Felice House is an American figurative painter and Professor of Art at Texas A&M University. She is most known for her oil-painting portraits of famous Western characters re-imagined as women.
Felice House | |
|---|---|
| Born | North Carolina, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Schuler School of Fine Arts, The University of Texas |
| Known for | Painting, Photography |
| Website | felicehouse.com |
Early life and education
editHouse grew up in Massachusetts in a family of artists.[1] Her grandmother is a weaver, her father worked in computer graphics, and her mother is a painter.[2]
House attended an international Baháʼí Faith boarding high school in Canada. Her classmates represented 57 different countries and race and gender equality were central discussions in the curriculum.[3] House has noted that her early academic experience there has influenced her art.[3]
House studied painting at the Schuler School of Fine Arts in Baltimore, Maryland[1] and earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Texas in 2011.[4][5]
She is an artist, as well as an assistant professor of art at Texas A&M University.[6][3][7]
Works
editHouse is most known for her portrait series, Re/Western and Face West, which both take classic cowboy characters played by actors like James Dean, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood,[8] Alan Ladd,[3] and Gary Cooper,[2] and re-imagine them as women.[2] House has said that she is drawn to the Western film genre, but is frustrated by the gender norms played out in traditional Western narratives.[8] By painting well-known leading characters as women, House challenges the male-dominated nature of the Western film industry.[9][8][7] She also hopes to juxtapose male cowboy archetypes against the roles offered to women in those films, which tend to be passive characters or sexist tropes.[6][1]
House has exhibited paintings in galleries and museums across the United States and Canada including Maryland, Georgia, Colorado, Louisiana, Tennessee, New Mexico, Texas, and Nova Scotia.[10] She has also shown her work in the U.K.[5]
Style
editHouse paints her portraits on canvases that are slightly larger than life so that viewers must look up to see the whole subject.[1][2]
For her cowgirl portraits, she asks family members, friends, colleagues, and strangers in her community to pose for her.[7][5] She often paints subjects to be non-confrontational, with gazes off in the distance.[1]
References
edit- ^ a b c d e Rizzo, Cailey (February 19, 2017). "Painter Felice House Reimagines Classic Cowboys as Women". Vice.
- ^ a b c d Connelly, Laura (January 18, 2017). "Paintings of female cowboys offer a feminist view of the Wild West". Creative Boom.
- ^ a b c d Lopez, Richard (August 12, 2019). "Artist Felice House's Western art puts women in power". Midland Reporter Telegram.
- ^ "Faculty biography". Texas A&M University Division of Research.
- ^ a b c Edelman, Amelia (March 8, 2017). "Artist Replaces Classic Cowboys With Women & It's Amazing". Refinery29.
- ^ a b Porter, Evan (March 7, 2017). "An artist replaced the men in these classic Westerns with women. The images are awesome". Upworthy.
- ^ a b c Lopez, Rich (August 15, 2019). "The All-Cowgirl Exhibition Face West Flips the Gender Norms of Westerns". Cowboys & Indians.
- ^ a b c Sierzputowski, Kate (February 27, 2017). "Artist Felice House Reimagines Scenes from Classic Western Films with Female Cowboys as Leads". Colossal.
- ^ "Re-Western: Gender-Flipping Paintings by Felice House". Inspiration Grid. July 31, 2018.
- ^ "RE•WESTERN: Portraits by Felice House". Hypertext Magazine. February 5, 2016.