Jackie Felix, painter who explored human condition
Sept. 19, 1929—Sept. 19, 2009
Jackie Felix paintings often explored darker aspects of the human condition— especially the gender wars—from the woman’s viewpoint.
For example, “Reel Love Series/Voice Over Malibu,” from the late 1980s, “seems right out of film noir,” News art critic Richard Huntington wrote in a review of her 2006 show in Buffalo Arts Studio. A man and woman embrace in the foreground, while behind them another man in a straitjacket is suspended upside down over a blue oval representing watery doom.
“It is as though we came in late in this ‘movie’ and missed the setup,” Huntington surmised. “Now we have to try to invent what led up to this dire predicament and guess at the culpability of the self-absorbed lovers.”
Such images made Mrs. Felix, who died Sept. 19—her 80th birthday—in the Center for Hospice& Palliative Care, Cheektowaga, “one of the more formidable artists to work with the expressionistic figure in recent years,” the critic reckoned.
A Pittsburgh native, she earned her bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Pittsburgh and after teaching in Westchester County, north of New York City, came to Buffalo.
Though she recalled having painted “as much art as possible” back then, it was only after earning her master of fine arts degree from the University at Buffalo in 1981, at age 52, that she became a working artist—and began drawing critical acclaim.
From her studio in the Tri-Main Center over the last 16 years, Mrs. Felix generated a widely exhibited array of paintings, etchings and lithographs.
To supplement her income, she taught workshops for Elderhostel, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, Art in Schools, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center and the Art with Artists program at Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
She was an adjunct member of the Buffalo State College art faculty and taught at Parsons School of Design’s summer printmaking workshop in Lake Placid.
Mrs. Felix also helped design the ancient Egypt Exhibit at the Buffalo Museum of Science, painted murals and accepted private commissions. She served on the Ohio Arts Council grants panel, was a visiting artist at Oberlin College and worked weekends at the Buffalo&Erie County Historical Society.
Most recently, she was among three artists featured in “Balancing Acts,” a spring exhibit in Carnegie Art Center, North Tonawanda.
Her husband, Alvin, survives. A celebration of her life will begin at 10:30
a. m. Saturday in Burchfield Penney Art Center. —Tom Buckham
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