By ALLEN ESSEX
March 27, 2007 - 12:00AM
 
Gabe Hernandez/Valley Morning Star, Jo Fiegel has been teaching art for about 40 years and has been drawing since she was a little girl. Fiegel painted her first oil when she was in college at Texas A&I University in 1947 and sold her first painting
 
After a lifetime of making her passion for art fit into a life of traveling around the world, wherever her husband's career in the oil industry took them, Jo Fiegel now has the chance to focus on painting.
"I've been teaching for about 30 or 40 years," the Aransas Pass native said.
"I've been drawing since I was a little girl," she said. "I painted my first in oil when I went away to college (Texas A&I University in 1947) when I was 17."
But marriage and the birth of her daughter interrupted college, she said.
"After I had a year in college, I married and my husband, Francis Fiegel, went to work in the oil industry," she said.
"He was in the construction end of the oil industry," she said of her husband.
She and her husband lived all over the United States and then in places like Africa, Brazil and Puerto Rico, Fiegel said. There were also stints in Venezuela and Colombia.
She would attend art classes anywhere she had the opportunity, she said.
She and her husband first visited Harlingen in 1977. "I've been teaching on and off ever since I came here," Fiegel said.
First just a place to winter, Harlingen developed into her home, she said.
"I moved to Harlingen in 1988 and I was already teaching (art) in the trailer parks," she said. "My husband died, and I just stayed here and I've been making my living with my art ever since."
She now teaches art at Golden Palms, with residents and visitors attending her classes at the facility's art room.
But, earlier, she held classes at Winter Texan trailer parks, she said.
"I did those paint-alongs like they do on the television," she said. "You paint a picture and they follow you, but it just wore me out. It was terribly stressful. I did that for about six years."
Some of her students began in her classes in the trailer parks, she said. Two women have been taking art lessons from her for 16 years, she said. Her oldest student is in her 90s.
Many of her paintings are made from photos she has taken during her world travels, Fiegel said. One of her favorites is an oil painting of a young girl she saw through a chicken wire fence in her back yard in Brazil.
The girl was riding a swing and her long hair would drag on the ground as she leaned way back, Fiegel said. She ran home for a camera, took a photo and later used it to create the painting.
One of the largest paintings she has done is the baptistery background at the downtown Church of Christ in Harlingen, which is an 8-foot by 8-foot mural of the Frio River, she said.
Her art is also shown and sold at the annual Beachcombers art show on South Padre Island, she said.