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.

Early life and education

House grew up in Massachusetts in a family of artists. Her grandmother is a weaver, her father worked in computer graphics, and her mother is a painter. 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. House has noted that her early academic experience there has influenced her art. House studied painting at the

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, Maryland and earned her

Master of Fine Arts A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admini ...

degree in painting from the University of Texas in 2011. She is an artist, as well as an assistant professor of art at Texas A&M University.

Works

House is most known for her portrait series, ''Re/Western'' and ''Face West'', which both take classic cowboy characters played by actors like

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, and Gary Cooper, and re-imagine them as women. 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. By painting well-known leading characters as women, House challenges the male-dominated nature of the Western film industry. 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. 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. She has also shown her work in the U.K.

Style

House paints her portraits on canvases that are slightly larger than life so that viewers must look up to see the whole subject. For her cowgirl portraits, she asks family members, friends, colleagues, and strangers in her community to pose for her. She often paints subjects to be non-confrontational, with gazes off in the distance.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:House, Felice 20th-century American painters American women artists American women academics Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American painters Artists from Massachusetts University of Texas at Austin alumni Texas A&M University faculty 20th-century American women 21st-century American women