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.[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 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 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]
