Trading Olympic Rings for Art Circles, Former Athletes Show Creative Mettle

After the Games, a Flip to Painting and Sculpture; Fleming 'Determined' to Master Strokes

By ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES And JEANNE WHALEN

Kader Klouchi is an athlete, but he's also an artist. The Algerian native competed in long jump in the 1992 summer olympics. But his sport wasn't enough, so he found a way to express himself through painting.

LONDON—Figure skater Peggy Fleming may best be remembered for her three World Championship titles and her gold medal in the 1968 Winter Olympics. These days, she says, she's hoping to become known for something else: her art.

Inspired by one of her son's art classes, she took up painting five years ago and got hooked. "It's scary to jump in for the first time," she says. But "I thought, 'Come on, just do it.'" She started off painting simple stuff—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, spools of thread, Olympic rings—often mixing acrylic with burlap or sand to add texture.

Now, Ms. Fleming, 64 years old, lives in Los Gatos, Calif., and until recently ran a winery with her husband. She says she's working on a more ambitious landscape of a vineyard featuring workers picking grapes and a barn in the background. "I'm doing my vanishing-point thing," she says. "I'm not so good at it, but I'm determined I'm going to do this."

Olympian Art

Peter Schifrin, a member of the U.S. fencing team 
in the 1984 Olympics, stands by a model of one 
of his 'Wings' sculptures.

Putting it in perspective, Olympians are quite an artistic bunch. Larry Young, 69, an American race walker who won bronze medals in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics, is an accomplished sculptor.

Kader Klouchi, 43, an Algerian long jumper who competed in the 1992 Games, now makes a living off his paintings, which he describes as "the boundary between abstract and figurative work."

"I don't like representing a nose or fingers or things," he says. "I'm going right to the focus, which is movement, only movement." His pieces depict athletes, dancers and bullfighters in motion, with energetic, sweeping strokes.

Works by these athletes—and 20 more—have been on display in London throughout the Games. The pieces form part of the collection of the Art of the Olympians museum in Fort Myers, Fla., a two-year-old institution celebrating the creative talents of Olympians past and present.

It also pays homage to an often-forgotten piece of Olympic history: Art was a competitive event in the early period of the Games, from 1912 to 1948. Medals were given in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture.

Some athletes, like Mr. Klouchi, were already experimenting with art at the time they competed, then dedicated themselves more fully to it when their sports careers ended. After the 1992 Games, Mr. Klouchi says, "I was full of energy as an athlete, and I needed to express myself another way, through art."

Others, like Tony Moore, a 60-year-old Fijian track athlete who competed in the 1976 Olympics and now writes poetry, found their outlet later in life. In the mid-1990s, "I began to experience sudden surges of creativity," he says. "I experienced a pressing need to write."

In 2008, before the Fort Myers museum was completed, organizers sent 30 pieces to the Beijing Olympics. But they were housed in a distant location and partly outdoors, prompting museum officials to send replicas instead of originals.

Peggy Fleming

This year, most of the exhibit is at University College London (with additional pieces on display in Torbay, England), in the heart of the city. It has drawn a few thousand visitors, organizers say.

Among them was Leslie Tucker, an American who stopped by last week and expressed surprise that so many Olympic athletes dabble in art. "I had no idea," she said. "I was the artist in my family, and my brother was the swimmer, so they were separate in my mind."

The Art of the Olympians museum was the brainchild of the late Al Oerter, who won gold medals in the discus competition in four consecutive Olympic Games, from 1956 to 1968. He first tried painting in 1980, when the company now known as Anheuser-Busch InBev NV sponsored an art project and asked him to create something representative of his sport.

"He tried to draw the grass and the sky, and it was just pathetic," says his widow, Cathy Oerter. So he came up with another idea. He poured blobs of paint on a canvas and hurled a discus at it, sending paint flying everywhere. That became his signature style for a while, with a series titled "Impact."

When the Alliance for the Arts in Fort Myers, where the Oerters had settled, asked him to exhibit some of his pieces in 2005, he decided to recruit some fellow Olympians who also were artists. That led him to the idea of founding a museum. When he died of heart failure in 2007, Ms. Oerter continued to work on the project. Today, the museum's collection includes nearly 300 artworks by about 70 Olympians.

Pierre de Coubertin, considered the father of the modern Olympic Games, would be pleased. A proponent of marrying sport and art, he insisted that Olympic host cities, starting with Stockholm in 1912, include art competitions in five categories.

The events weren't exactly a hit, says Richard Stanton, author of "The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions." Professional artists were barred from competing. Aspiring artists didn't express much interest. And critics sneered that the work was mediocre. Organizers eliminated the art competitions after the 1948 Games.

"Did Mona Lisa proceed from those events? No," Mr. Stanton says. But "was it great occasionally? Yes." Among the winners was Mr. Coubertin himself, who, under a pseudonym, won a gold medal in literature in 1912 for his "Ode to Sport."

Whether the growing collection at the Art of the Olympians museum elicits critical acclaim remains to be seen. The bar to admission is not high. "Right now, we're not judging," says Sandy Talaga, director of operations, though "it does have to be considered somewhat good art."

While some works might seem rudimentary, a number of Olympians have built successful careers as artists. Peter Schifrin, a member of the U.S. fencing team in the 1984 Olympics, is a longtime sculptor who has done numerous commissioned pieces and teaches sculpture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Jean-Blaise Evequoz, 59, a Swiss fencer who competed in the 1976 Olympics, has exhibited his paintings all over the world and has several shows coming up in Italy. He's sort of the philosopher of the group. "When you see my works, it seems they change a lot," he says, with a thick French accent. "But in reality, they go for the same aim: universality."