Felix MacNee is a sought after San Francisco artist. He’s a renaissance man with a dark style and brilliant technique.
Felix's art is not for everyone. It's dark, intense and thought provoking. His contemporary oil paintings are ethereal landscapes filled with fragments of a theatrical world. Looking at his work, I often can’t tell if what I’m seeing is something from a horror movie, a love story, or a black mirror episode. For example, two women in dark capes blend into an apocalyptic landscape, or a laughing demon tears a tree out of the ground. Felix’s works are aptly titled: Death and His Dog Ignoring God, Madness of the War, and Untitled – Surreal Interior Scene, just to name a few.
On a personal level, Felix is a bit of an eccentric – in the best way! When I saw him at his recent opening in Petaluma, he was wearing a spotless, vintage- looking suit and colorful shoes. I noticed him joking around with, presumably, many friends who had come to support him. In addition to being an artist, Felix is a highly skilled poker and chess player, a dada performance artist, and a talented musician.
Felix is a well-trained artist; his paintings leave no doubt about that. Anything in his art that looks like a mistake was almost certainly done intentionally. As part of his natural color correction process, Felix often inserts accents of un-matching colors. These contrasting hints and shadows create a sense of dissonance in his work that contributes to his overall signature style and macabre tone. More generally, his works all share qualities of precision and timelessness.
I appreciate how much control Felix yields over his process. His careful consideration of composition, lighting, scale of objects, their distance in scenes, color, and levels of abstraction brings unmistakable depth to his work. I imagine him working slowly and methodically, sitting for hours in front of the easel. I think about how he must feel while he waits for his art to marinate before him, knowing it may take him many years for him to finish a single painting.
Felix succeeds in creating imaginary arrangements with a surrealist twist. His favorite subjects are elephants, crooked trees, birds, crystals, and whales; he also incorporates Paleolithic cave paintings, Buddha statues, mysterious numbers and kabbalistic symbols. Interestingly, the faces he paints are usually quite attractive. Many of his characters are drawn with hypnotic-looking eyes and smooth, flawless skin tones characteristic of DaVinci’s later work and Picasso’s earlier work. Personally, I’m delighted by sprinklings of optical tricks and disfiguration in his works, an homage to Francis Bacon.
We highly encourage all art lovers to book a visit with Felix, preferably in the evening – Felix is a night owl! At his studio, you can buy limited archival prints of his original paintings and meet the man behind the artwork that’s shrouded in mystery. While you’re there, make sure to ask Felix about his materials, process, and creative intentions.
