IN THE STUDIO
Drawing is hard... Toget it rightat
the beginning means Idon’thave
to worry about fixing it later
philosophy behind southern Italian
cooking: “They had bad cuts of meat,
so they made amazing sauces”.
A typical day in the studio for Felicia
begins with a workout. Her exercise
bike faces the latest canvases on the
wall, so she can assess her progress
while she rides. Her paintings usually
fall into two categories. The first are
paintings from life, often oil on paper
works, created to strengthen skills
and build muscle memory. Then there
are “artworks”, larger pieces usually
based around photographs. “I just
tend to take pictures of anything that
sparks me. Sometimes it will take
days to sift through them all and it’s
like trying to organise my thoughts.”
With the preferred image on her
computer screen, Felicia will then
spend several days on the drawing,
refining a chosen composition to its
very essence. “It’s actually harder to
make a shape true but less detailed,”
she says. “The more detail I take out,
the more perfect what I leave in has
to be. Drawing is hard. To get it right
at the beginning means I don’t have
to worry about fixing it later and I can
use the energy to make an as-close-
to-perfect brushstroke or to get an
arrangement of colour that feels right.
Doing everything all at once doesn’t
work for me.”
Felicia’s biggest break came when
The Time Traveler – a six-foot paintingshe made during a three-month
residency at Red Bull Arts Detroit –
was awarded second prize at the BP
Portrait Award in 2018. It was painted
on top of another picture that wasn’t
working out: a snow scene of the
street she was living on. As she her
residency came to an end, she was
struggling to create larger paintings
for the final exhibition. “I went home
super frustrated. It was 95 degrees,
really humid, and [my boyfriend] Matt
was taking a nap. He had put a red
lightbulb in our lamp and there was
blue light coming from the window
and I thought this is it. It had that
intense colour and the difference
between warm and cool. It attracted
me so I tried to share it.”
Felicia photographed the scene
and, when she returned to the studio
the next day, she washed over the old
image and the new composition came
together quickly. “That was probably
the easiest painting I’ve ever made,”
she says today, “and I love it.”
The colours in The Time Traveler
were the result of a longer search for
high chroma, light value pigments
with a neon quality. After much
experimentation, she settled on
Brilliant Pink, Cadmium Orange and
Permanent Orange, all from MichaelABOVE Red
Light No.1, oil on
canvas, 61x61cmLEFT Felicia at work