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January 2011
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Writing with Paint, Painting with Words
Magazine Professor John Fennell Combines Journalism with Visual Art
By Chelsea Reynolds
Master's Student
Magazines are dichotomous machines: They hinge not just on editorial excellence but also on carefully executed aesthetics. This delicate balance between words and art is certainly what draws many young journalists to the field. For John Fennell, associate professor of magazine journalism, there is no better way to shape a magazine career than to practice fine art.
Fennell, whose professional accomplishments include a decade-plus career as editor-in-chief of Milwaukee Magazine, is an accomplished painter. His passion for painting, he says, helps him relay the importance of visual images in an editorial context to students in the School of Journalism.
"Because of my training and experience as a journalist and an artist, I speak two languages: words and images," he says. "In magazine journalism, these two languages work simultaneously to communicate ideas to readers. As a professor, I try to teach my students the differing powers of each language and how one informs the other."
Fennell admits that his first professional love is writing. It was the closure of the newspaper where he worked, though, that allowed him to fall in love with his second, visual art. Fennell wrote for Chicago's City News Bureau in the late 1970s. He then worked as a reporter for the Herald Palladium in Benton Harbor, Mich., before moving to the Chicago Daily News, where he worked as a "legman" for the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Mike Royko. When the paper folded after more than a century of operation, Fennell enrolled in the American Academy of Art. Coincidentally, the City News Bureau, also a century-old operation, closed its doors a few years later.
"I went to art school not knowing where my life would go," he says. "It was a flip of a coin. But it took me to a place I always should have been."
As a journalist, Fennell's connection to art has helped him develop an affinity with art directors and the ability to discuss lighting and angles with photographers. He shared a common language with graphic designers during his stint at Milwaukee Magazine. And he's excited about the opportunity to teach his students the same skills he so values in his own career.
"Great images attract readers, and powerful words complement those images, giving readers a fuller experience of the ideas that writers and visual communicators convey," Fennell says. "My experiments in painting are an effort to communicate ideas visually, just as the journalism I practice is an effort to communicate through words. My ultimate hope as a teacher is to pass on what I have learned about each of those disciplines to my students."
Beyond teaching many magazine writing and publishing courses in the School, Fennell has displayed his art at PS Gallery in Columbia, and an exhibit is planned in St. Louis in February. His most recent collection, Geometry of Light, debuted in September at the School of Journalism's strategic communication office in 140 Walter Williams Hall.
"I've been showing my work at the Perlow-Stephens Gallery (in downtown Columbia) for years," Fennell says. This is the third collection he's displayed in the Journalism School.
Dozens of journalism faculty, students and staff, as well as other University dignitaries enjoyed wine and cheese during the Sept. 16 opening of 13 of Fennell's recent works.
Although Fennell is an accomplished media professional and now focuses much of his time on his professorial commitments, he still spends his weekends painting in his garage studio. He says it's cathartic, a calling that helps him manage his otherwise hectic schedule.
"When I've painted all day long, it's as if I'm in another state. There's transcendence, a meditation, that occurs in art," he says. "If I'm after anything, I'm after wholeness - as an artist, as a journalist, as a human being."
Painting is certainly Fennell's means to this end.
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