The Lincoln-Way area is teeming with talented artists. Some have been recognized with awards and accolades by fine arts organizations, galleries and competitions across the country, yet remain relatively unknown locally.
Mokena resident Ted Fuka, 54, fits that description.
Since he began seriously working as a pastel artist in 2001 — a decision he made to make some life changes after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he said — Fuka’s artwork has been accepted at nine juried art competitions and four regional competitions.
Since 2007, he has won about a dozen awards ranging from sponsorship awards to “best in show.” One of his pastels, chosen from 2,600 entries, he said, placed in the “Pastel Journal” as one of the publication’s Top 100 Pastels of 2015.
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Despite his success, only once has Fuka sought and staged a solo exhibit, that being at the Orland Park Public Library, he said.
“I’m not really big on promotion,” Fuka said. “I know I should be. I’d much rather find myself working on (the artwork).”
That’s been the case since Fuka was growing up in Oak Lawn, he said. His interest in school was minimal, but he would draw “pretty much anything,” he said.
Comments written by his teachers in his Oak Lawn High School yearbook mentioned Fuka’s propensity for placing his tests second in importance to his love of drawing, he said.
“Teachers would write, ‘You’re the only kid I knew that spent more time drawing on his test rather than taking it,’ which, you know, was true,” Fuka said.
But it paid off.
After graduating from high school, Fuka earned an associate’s degree in 1985 from the American Academy of Art in Chicago and planned to start his career as a commercial artist. As it turned out, the timing wasn’t good. Although Fuka was employed for short periods of time, computers were just beginning to be used for typography, replacing commercial artists, Fuka said.
He said the companies that were hiring commercial artists for that work “just started going away.”
By 1994, Fuka had a wife, Laurie, and had settled in Mokena, where they raised sons Matt, 22, and Mark, 19. He was working as a freelance commercial artist from a leased space in the Tri Star Building on Schoolhouse Road where he still maintains his studio. Fuka said he began teaching himself how to use the computer for his work and became good enough to land projects “from soup to nuts with a number of Fortune 500 companies.”
His work might be recognizable to some on a cereal box at the grocery store, for instance.
Because of that success, Fuka said, he can’t quit his “day job.” It pays the bills. But he would love for his pastel artwork to become a means of financial support, and that remains a goal, he said.
The youngest of seven children, Fuka said he was inspired by the artistic talent of his oldest brother Kim, now a beadwork and quillwork artist in Wyoming. Fuka also remembers that his father, Robert, was unable to pursue his dream of a career in photography. Fuka, whose pastels all are drawn from photographs he takes of places, persons and things that inspire him, thinks there may be a connection between pursuing and fulfilling his dream as an artist with his father’s inability to do so.
Fuka inconspicuously hangs his award ribbons on a bulletin board in his Mokena studio, along with both personal and professional odds and ends, not because he doesn’t care about them, but because the awards are “yesterday’s news,” he said, and he’s focusing on the next accomplishment.
He’s not yet sure what that might be.
“I feel like there’s something else out there to attain,” he said. “I think it’s great winning (awards) … especially now, going to these pastel openings and getting awards, but I don’t know. I feel like there’s something that I haven’t reached yet. I don’t understand it myself.”
One of Fuka’s pastels, “River’s Edge,” has been accepted by the Connecticut Pastel Society’s 2015 Renaissance in Pastels National Juried Exhibition, being held through Dec. 12 at the UConn Stamford Art Gallery in Stamford, Conn. More than $10,000 in prizes will be awarded and artwork will be judged by “a jury of artists of national prominence,” according to a press release about the exhibit.
For more information about Fuka, visit www.Fukaillustration.com.
Ginger Brashinger is a freelance writer who covers the Lincoln-Way area.