By Maureen E. Moran '89

At a time when his contemporaries were contemplating retirement and a perfect round of golf, Henry "Chip" Feeley '63 decided to launch a new phase of his career and, indeed, his life.

Something had always been in the back of his mind, even as he served in the Navy, reached the highest levels in the world of advertising and raised four children. Something that began in his childhood and always maintained a presence in his life, taking up whatever time he could spare for it.

That something was art.

At 53 - an age when he could have been the parent of his 18-year-old classmates - Feeley enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. In retirement, the time was finally right to experience the artist's life.

A New Path

Feeley retired in 1993 from Leo Burnett Company Inc., the international advertising agency headquartered in Chicago, Ill., following a 30-year career. Reflecting upon the choices he had made, he decided then that the time was right to pursue art.

" I was an artist who somehow became a businessman," he says. "I always wondered if I had done the right thing. Should I have been persistent in being an artist? That was always an uncomfortable thing - not doing what I was put on this earth to do."

Despite his misgivings, Feeley made peace with his decisions. After all, he had a wife and four children to support. Experience has since shown him that being a fine artist "is not a way to make a lot of money," he says. "Business suited me … advertising is a tough, tough business. You can't think about much else."

Feeley had been taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Eventually the time came to make a decision - yet again - concerning the pull between art and business. "I was about to buy a business," Feeley recalls. "And I realized I couldn't be an artist and a businessman at the same time. Art requires total commitment and absorption. You can't really do anything else."

A conversation with a teacher at the Institute illuminated his path. "I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to being an artist," Feeley says.

With that, he enrolled full time as a first-year student at the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Art was a Hobby."

Feeley's first contact with art occurred early in childhood. His family spent summers in Duxbury, Mass., and two of his cousins served as babysitters and art instructors. They taught Feeley about painting and drawing - likely having no idea they were charting a course for him that would continue throughout his life.

As he got older, Feeley continued to pursue his interest in art and became known as the class artist. When it came time to select a college, he followed his father, Henry Feeley '37, to Mount St. James. Studying art wasn't even considered. "I was not aware there were art schools," Feeley recalls. Not only that, but with his Irish immigrant mother and his FBI special agent father, "there wasn't much interest in their son being an artist!" he says with a chuckle.

Though an economics major at Holy Cross, Feeley kept his alive, known - once again - as the class artist, he created the class display at homecoming. One year, when the opposing team's mascot was a tiger, Feeley crafted a papier-mâché Crusader slaying a tiger with a lance. Another year, a 14-foot high Holy Cross football player, made of chicken wire and crepe paper, scared the daylights out of the other team's Orangeman, a spectacle complete with orange-colored water.

" I was always doing some sort of art but not with the idea of being an artist," he recalls. "Art was a hobby."

A Change of Direction

After graduating from Holy Cross in 1963, Feeley again followed in his father's footsteps, doing a two-year stint in the Navy. He studied at the Naval Justice School in Newport, R.I., and applied to law schools. His father had also trained as a lawyer, although he never practiced. When Feeley entered Holy Cross, his father opened an investigative firm and looked forward to the day when his son would join him.

" The direction I was going was because of my dad," Feeley says. "I didn't really think much about it."

His father's death shortly after Feeley completed his time in Newport changed everything. He fulfilled his two-year commitment to the Navy in 1965 and briefly contemplated signing up to be a PT-boat commander in Vietnam - ultimately deciding against it. "I had to start thinking about what I was going to do," Feeley recalls. "I wasn't wild about being a lawyer."

He took stock of his skills. "I'm an idea person. I'm creative. I like art, and I'm good at it," he recalls thinking. The logical conclusion? An art position at an advertising agency.

Without any type of artistic portfolio and only landscapes to his credit, Feeley was woefully naive about the experience needed to get such a position. "I didn't know anything about commercial art," he recalls. Desperation set in, and when the Leo Burnett Company in Chicago offered him a position in the research department, Feeley jumped at the chance - despite the fact that, as he says, "I didn't even know what they were talking about!"

One thing led to another, however, and Feeley moved into client services - and up the corporate ladder. He was involved with some of the most recognized products in recent memory: Nestlé, Mattel, Allstate Insurance, Heinz. During his 30-year career, Feeley served at the highest levels of Leo Burnett, including chair and chief executive officer of Leo Burnett International - and, in 1992, as vice chairman, corporate director of client services, for Leo Burnett Company Inc. and Leo Burnett Worldwide Inc.

Life Comes Full Circle

Known to his Holy Cross classmates as "Chip," in the art world, Feeley goes by "Hank." Completing his classes at the Art Institute in two years, he was accepted into an advanced painting program while a student. "I learned from the other students, who were spectacular, unbelievable artists," he says.

Feeley's time at the Institute was pivotal in his evolution as an artist. "It changed my whole concept of art and what art-making is, and what I do," he recalls. "The Art Institute is avant-garde. They don't want to teach landscapes. They teach the next generation of ground-breaking creators. The art I do today is not what I could have imagined."

The landscapes he began with his cousins so many summers ago in Duxbury have evolved. "Art is not pretty pictures," says Feeley, now 63. "If I could paint a landscape better than Monet, I'd try it. I want to paint what's me. I want to be a first-class Hank Feeley."

Feeley counts among his influences Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Fairfield Porter. In addition to sculpture, he paints with oils and acrylics. Critics commenting on his use of rich color have described his work as "ambitious" and "heroic." His paintings are social commentaries, often juxtaposing unlikely images: in "Belief," for example, a woman on a beach holds aloft a laptop computer with a dove - holding what appears to be an olive branch in its beak - clearly visible in the monitor.

Now almost a decade into his second career, Feeley exhibits in galleries in New York and Chicago. He works on three-to-four paintings at a time, on canvases that can be 14 feet wide and 10 feet high. His creative process is organic, not linear - when asked how long he takes to create a painting, Feeley responds as the artist he is.

"My friends who are business people think in terms of productivity," he says. "I say to them, 'At the end of the year, I will have ready 10 to 12 paintings and three to four sculptures I am willing to show.'"

Feeley has yet one more objective he would like to achieve: "To be an influence in the history of art … Will it ever happen? Highly unlikely, but it's what keeps me going."

Maureen Moran is a freelance writer from Mansfield, Mass.