ART by DESIGN
Felice House
Story By KATIE CANALES | Photography by TIMOTHY DOUGLASS
N
ot many people can say they were commissioned to create a
commemorative poster for the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
Felice House can.
A representational figure painter with a focus on feminist
portraiture, Felice teaches in the visualization department at Texas
A&M University. Felice received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, a Master of Science from the
Visualization Department at Texas A&M and a Master of Fine Arts
from The University of Texas at Austin.
Before coming to Texas A&M as a graduate student, Felice
worked for a documentary film company in upstate New York.
There she recognized that the contemporary renaissance in art was
happening in the digital realm and wanted the skills to be a part of
it.
“I ended up going to the visualization department and really
focusing on how fine art traditional painting can be enhanced
through the use of computer technology,” says Felice.
Felice grew up with a studio in her house since her mother was
a painter. From an early age, she recognized that women were one
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dimensionally represented by the media and made it her mission to
broaden the portrayal of women in art. “Even as a child, I remember
feeling strongly about women owning their own power, and having
power and recognized that this was not fully happening in society.
I’ve always been really attracted to that and interested in that,” says
Felice.
In high school, Felice made a series of large-scale drawings of
women sourced from photographic images she collected and took.
“I think it was an intuitive approach to the problem of inequality.
That was my voice; what I could do was make images that look like
people, and the images that I made were images about women and
power,” says Felice.
Felice’s first solo art show was entitled “Putting it On and Taking
It Off.” The show consisted of taking a 1950s home economics
textbook that detailed the stages of makeup application and
moc