A painter of "delightful memories" of small-town life of Dyer, Arkansas, Fannie Spelce was a professional nurse who worked in Houston from 1955 through 1959 with Dr. Michael DeBakey in his pioneering open-heart surgery. She retired from her forty-two-year nursing career in 1972 and devoted herself to her talent and interest in fine-art painting.
In the summer of 1966, she took art lessons at Laguna Gloria Art Museum, but a teacher discouraged her by describing her work as "primitive". He suggested that she not take lessons but just work on her own.
By 1970, she had a relatively large body of work, and her son, Bennett, an advertising executive, took some of her paintings to New York City, where a representative of the Kennedy Galleries offered to represent her. Her highly detailed, ultra precise depictions scenes of old-fashioned, good times near her Ozark-farm birthplace, gained widespread attention.
In totality, she completed nearly 500 paintings, which are "happy renditions of days gone by, even though not everyone may agree with the rose-colored view that the artist presents." (288)
Source:
Chuck and Jan Rosenak, "Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of "Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists"
Fannie Spelce, Cardiac Nurse and a Folk Artist, Dies at 89
By Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr.
April 19, 1998
Cardiac patients who were lucky enough to make it to Houston in the days Michael E. DeBakey and Denton E. Cooley were pioneering open heart surgery at Methodist Hospital were doubly fortunate that the nurse in charge of the operating room was Fannie Lou Spelce, a well-grounded, no-nonsense woman with a scalpel-sharp eye for detail and a spirited commitment to professional excellence.
Mrs. Spelce, who had to overcome considerable odds to make it to the pinnacle of her profession and who earned acclaim as a folk artist known as the Grandma Moses of Texas, died at her home in Austin on April 11. She was 89 years old.
A native of the little Ozarks town of Dwyer, Ark., and the first member of her farm family to attend college, Mrs. Spelce, who was born in 1908, completed four years of nursing training in Fort Smith, Ark., spent a high-kicking year in New York honing her skills at the city's leading hospitals, then returned to Arkansas to begin a troubled marriage and a hopscotching career working in a series of small-town and big city hospitals from Arkansas to California.
A single mother long before the term was coined, Mrs. Spelce often held two jobs but still had so much trouble making ends meet she sometimes could not afford a babysitter for the night shift, so while living in California she put her two sons to bed in a car outside the Berkeley hospital rather than leave them home alone.
If Mrs. Spelce demonstrated some remarkable perseverance in dealing with the vagaries of modern life, the well-spring of her character eventually became manifest, so much so that when she died at her home in Austin, Mrs. Spelce was remembered less for her distinguished nursing career than as an acclaimed folk artist who had for 20 years turned out oil paintings of life on an Arkansas farm in such rich and vivid detail that it was apparent that her childhood had not been a distant memory but something she had carried with her close to the surface throughout her life.
Mrs. Spelce's remarkable talent led to a one-woman show in New York, her inclusion in a number of folk-art anthologies and renown as the Grandma Moses of Texas.
Her emergence as an artist came about by accident. Leaving Dallas at the end of the 1950's to be near her sons, who had settled in Austin after graduation from the University of Texas, she took a job as a nurse at a private school, a position that gave her a year-round home in the school infirmary and left her with free time in the summer.
When a friend signed up for an oil painting class at a gallery and asked Mrs. Spelce to join her, she agreed, saying she had always wanted to draw.
The first day, according to family legend, when the teacher arranged a classic still life and told his students to go to work, Mrs. Spelce spent the first part of the class working in a tiny area at the center of the canvas until the teacher told her she was supposed to use the entire surface. Too ashamed to make a new start in public, Mrs. Spelce spent the rest of the class cleaning off her work, then took the canvas home, painted the still life from memory, took her work in the next day and sheepishly asked the teacher if that was what he had in mind.
The teacher was so thunderstruck by the painting and by his student's raw, unschooled talent that he blurted out that she was a primitive. ''I may be old,'' Mrs. Spelce retorted, ''but I'm not primitive.''
Encouraged to paint what she wanted, Mrs. Spelce drew on her childhood, sometimes using old photographs as a guide but mainly relying on her memory to create scores of paintings marked by painstakingly detailed foregrounds and shimmering, impressionistic backgrounds.
Her best-known painting, ''The Quilting Bee,'' took a year to produce, partly because Mrs. Spelce, using a magnifying glass and a single-hair brush, painted the scene's window curtains thread by thread.
Folk art is rarely fashionable, but after a son took several of her paintings to New York, the art dealers were so impressed that a bidding war broke out among them until Mrs. Spelce agreed to a show at the Kennedy Galleries in 1972.
Although her work included portraits of family members and some urban scenes, Mrs. Spelce's favorite subject was her childhood farm, a decidedly busy and happy place, according to her renderings, and one that clearly gave her a much-recollected contentment in her long nursing career.
In addition to her sons, Neal and Bennett, both of Dallas, Mrs. Spelce is survived by two sisters, Inez Robertson of Jackson, Calif., and Marie Colvett of Grass Valley, Calif., and two grandchildren.
Source: NY Times (April 19, 1998)
