Austin Founder Lions Club

"Work Standing Up: The Life and Art of Paul Fontaine."

  • 01 May 2014
  • 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM
  • 700 Dawson Rd, Austin TX, 78704

Registration

***NEW MEETING LOCATION - 700 DAWSON RD***



"Work Standing Up: The Life and Art of Paul Fontaine"
by Claudia Chidester


introduction by Lion Mimi Rosenthal



Claudia Chidester, director of the Fontaine Archive will give a pictorial overview of the art and story of her father Paul Fontaine ( 1913-1996), about whom she has published a book: Work Standing Up: The Life and Art of Paul Fontaine. He was a classically trained WPA artist, a WWII veteran and remained in Germany for 25 years after the war. He became part of the abstract art movement there only to move in 1970 to Mexico and double his artistic output for the next 25 years. He lived his last four years in Austin, painting daily.  



Claudia ChidesterClaudia Fontaine Chidester is the director of the Fontaine Archive, which preserves and makes accessible the works of the writer and photographer Virginia Fontaine and the painter Paul Fontaine. 

She was born in Frankfurt Germany and lived her first twelve years in neighboring Darmstadt until moving with her parents to Guadalajara, Mexico in 1970. After her high school years in Mexico, she moved to Massachusetts for her college education at Wellesley where she earned a degree in Art History. She worked at Smith College for five years and then moved to Austin in 1985 to earn her Master’s degree in Information Science at UT Austin. She took a slightly detour in her education and began working for technology firms IBM and Texas Instruments, followed by fourteen years at the venture capital firm Austin Ventures as their Director of Research. This gave her the experience she needed to become an adjunct professor at the School of Information, UT Austin, where she has been teaching courses on competitive intelligence research since 1992. 

She also enjoys helping non-profits. 
She is currently vice president of the board of ABC: Austin Bat Cave, a writing and tutoring center that offers free writing workshops to kids 6 to 18. This organization introduced her to many talented writers, designers and editors in Austin that made writing and publishing a book on Fontaine a possibility. 

She has three children and her husband of nearly 30 years is a software engineer and musician. Claudia enjoys writing and researching and is particularly passionate about finding all the owners of Fontaine art who number in the hundreds in Germany, US and Mexico.







Featured Lunch Menu: 
Red Wine Braised Eye of the Round in Rich Gravy with Carrots and Onions and Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Fried Chicken Breast with Green Beans
Romaine and Iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes
Strawberry Shortcake with whipped cream





Please register by 5pm on Tuesday

We order meals based on your reservations and must pay for them even if you do not show up. Please keep this in mind if your plans shift and cancel your reservation so we can adjust the headcount.


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