Felicia Forte incorporates out-of-focus exposures, abstracted shapes and a subdued palette of primary colors in haunting depictions of a fluid reality.

By B.J. Foreman

Felicia Forte’s art has undergone many changes, progressing in phases under a self-imposed discipline. Years ago, when she wasn’t happy with the color in her work, she decided to limit herself to the Zorn palette, named for portraitist Anders Zorn, who worked with muted hues mixed from four colors: cadmium red, yellow ochre, titanium white and ivory black. Forte points out that the Zorn palette is really a primary-color palette with black serving as blue. “After a couple of years,” she says, “I learned to control my use of color, which let me then use more color.” She began slowly to introduce other hues into her palette, starting with a purple that she mixed from ultramarine blue, permanent rose and titanium white. “It was exciting,” she says, “to see the capacity of each color so much better.”

Play of Light and Shapes

More recently, Forte has been experimenting with light and shadow effects. This development started serendipitously as she began photo-documenting moments of her life with her iPhone. In every 100 or so shots, there was one that she felt would make an interesting reference for a painting, and she noticed a sameness to the shots that had caught her eye: They were either over- or underexposed, showing halos of light and out-of-focus images, and catching silhouetted people in midmovement. She liked the fact that these images were photographic “accidents,” yet they kept popping up. The suffused light and simplified shapes in these photos found their way into paintings that suggest a fleeting reality.

Related to this play of light, value and shape are reductionist qualities that she achieves by depicting only portions of an object or by leaving out details, such as facial features. In fact, what’s not in one of Forte’s paintings may be its most interesting part. As her work has become more painterly and abstract, there are often unpainted white spaces on her canvases. Just the most important information is present.

Shifting Subject Matter

Although Forte clearly enjoys painting portraits and figures, she’s comfortable with other genres. “I find that my subject matter has shifted as my surroundings have,” says Forte. “Changes over time in where I work, teach and live are all clearly illustrated in my paintings. I’ve come to find huge relief in this fact, and I feel that my work weaves together a description of time passing in my life, so I need not pointedly decide what my work should say.” As a case in point, her new aesthetic began to come together with the painting Black Dog. This piece began as a snapshot of one of Forte’s regularly employed models, who was walking through the building where Forte’s studio is located. The space around the subject is another artist’s studio with blank canvases lining the walls. The model proceeds tentatively, in the dark, following the black dog that lives in the studio building.

To Forte, the image became a metaphor for her search to create work confidently in her own voice—to record her own journey. Created mostly in the Zorn palette, Black Dog exhibits the suffused light Forte has become so fond of.

Painting Boldly

Although Forte says she’d like eventually to try different media, for now she’s staying with oil. “Oil still offers me endless challenges,” she says. “I’m immersed in it and totally absorbed by it.” In addition to linen canvas, she uses Canson Arches oil paper as her surface. “I love to slick it up royally with a medium of Gamblin Gamsol (solvent) and walnut oil mixed in a 50-50 ratio,” she says.

She points out that oil paper is absorbent and doesn’t allow erasing paint marks with solvent as, perhaps, lead-primed canvas would. At first, she found these features challenging, but they ultimately led to a major breakthrough. “Oil paper forced me to let go of my tendency to control the process with very accurate drawing in paint,” she says. “Instead, I began laying in big shapes of color and value—thinking more tonally and in terms of big planes. In short, the oil paper forced me to be more painterly and to trust that I had enough knowledge to fix any awkward drawing as I went. Not only did I discover that I did indeed have enough knowledge to paint boldly, but I also found that the effect created was ultimately more to my taste than the outcomes of paintings for which I’d played it safe.”

Passion for Alla Prima

Forte paints en plein air and in the studio, from life and from photo references, alla prima and in stages—although alla prima clearly gives free rein to her bold style. “Alla prima is like a sport to me,” she says. “It’s endlessly entertaining and challenging, and no application is ever the same. Painting this way is like having a fresh puzzle to solve each day, and that keeps me sharp and creative.”

In addition to painting for commission and exhibition, Forte keeps up a rigorous teaching schedule that includes classes in alla prima portraiture. Her teaching involves a specific method that differs from the Arches oil paper “free-for-all” described previously. “This alla prima is a measured process that solidifies a basic value pattern and promotes very accurate drawing, and therefore, likeness,” says Forte. “I have handouts in both color and black and white that illustrate that big value relationships stay intact, even in the finished portrait, where there is varied color and detail.”

The End—or Is It?

In the midst of her own stylistic evolution, Forte urges her students to give themselves time to develop: “All the things that you think are holding back your career really aren’t. When you relax, the good work comes.” There is, nevertheless, a tension between staying relaxed and open and pushing oneself to walk a developmental path. For one thing, the path isn’t clearly delineated; it may involve foraging or backtracking, and it constantly demands choices. This is the reason Forte struggles with finishing paintings. As she puts it, “When you’re developing a unique style, you don’t know what your work will look like. I don’t know when to stop because I didn’t know how my work should look. Figuring that out is about growing up as a painter.” Clearly, she’s meeting that challenge.

Demo: Alla Prima Lesson in Restraint

By Felicia Forte

I use this three-hour alla prima exercise to teach my students how to solve problems in a constrained time period and with a restricted palette of cadmium red, yellow ochre, titanium white and ivory black. Ultimately, overcoming limitations leads to creativity.

1. Draw Value Lines: I painted this study on matboard coated with three thinned layers of white acrylic gesso that I’d mixed with black acrylic paint to give the gesso a gray tint. I mixed my “drawing” color (ivory black with a bit of cadmium red and then smaller amounts of yellow ochre and white) to a value and hue representative of the darks in my subject. To draw the face, I used a flat bristle brush, and I used a similar brush with a very small amount of Gamblin Gamsol as an eraser brush. I squinted at my subject to eliminate mid-values because, at this point, I wanted to see only two values: light and dark. I drew straight lines to separate these lights and darks but avoided filling in the dark shapes until I felt the drawing was complete and pleasingly designed.

2. Block In the Darks: Feeling satisfied with my drawing, I filled in the dark shapes with my drawing color. I applied the paint sparsely, although I didn’t thin it with Gamsol because I find watery paint difficult to control. As I filled in the darks, I referred to my subject and corrected any drawing errors I found.

3. Block In the Lights: Next, I mixed a color for the light shapes, starting with red and yellow and then adding white and small amounts of black to adjust to the subject’s unique skin tone. This color represented the average hue and value that I saw when I squinted my eyes at my subject. At this point, my goal was to get the dark and light relationship correct. I tell my students to look at the big picture; don’t zoom in on details.

4. Develop Small Areas: Having blocked in my darks and lights, I could address smaller areas one by one. In a portrait like this, I like to start with an eye. This feature has a variety of values, edges, colors and color temperatures, but occupies a very small spot on a painting. By limiting my work to this one feature, I could solve problems as I determined my approach to the painting—without putting marks all over the surface. Once I’d figured out the eye, I traveled to the cheek, then the nose and so forth.

5. Turn Forms: Most of my focus in an alla prima painting is on the light areas. If the darks are designed elegantly and are painted in the correct values, I can work right up to them and then just turn the form, where the light meets the dark, with the correct color and edge quality. The viewer’s eye fills in the rest of the information. Even when under a time restraint, I paint slowly and try to weigh each brushstroke before I put it down. Maryanna (oil on primed matboard, 10×8) is the result of a three-hour painting session.

Meet Felicia Forte

Five years ago, Felicia Forte decided that, after a lifetime of art classes, including studies at the California Art Institute, in Calabasas, and the Art Students League of New York, she would give up bartending and waitressing and put all her efforts into her art. Today, besides creating her own works, she takes on commissions and teaches painting and drawing in her studio, through her website and at the Sadie Valeri Atelier. In December 2013, she was awarded a month-long residency at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, and in 2014, she taught at the Plein Air Convention and Expo, in Monterey-Carmel, Calif. Principle Gallery, in Alexandria, Va., represents her work. 

This article first appeared in The Artist’s Magazine.