FELIX MACNEE

Artist’s Statement
“Imogene”

When working on any one painting, I don’t necessarily see a through-line to my other work, or my work as a whole. I’m interested in the painting in front of me, and the challenges and pleasures of making it. If you make enough paintings, they develop a kinship with each other, and you begin to see common themes and threads running through them. When I paint a figure, I don’t want it to look like a specific person. I’m not interested in portraiture or description. I want the figures to feel totemic, or symbolic. I’ve repainted figures because they look too much like a real person, some individual. I don’t want people to wonder, “Who is that?” I want them to feel that the painting is somehow talking about them. Having said that, again and again, people have looked at my paintings and said, “That’s Imogene!” I suppose in a way they are Imogene. They are and they aren’t.
She is my wife and she inspires me. But really, I’m looking for a feeling: a feeling of nostalgia for something or someone who never was.

 

Artist Biography

I was born in 1970, in Chicago into a family of artists. My grandfather was a painter and an art historian at the University of Chicago; my father, a musician and artist in New Orleans and my mother, a poet. Following in their footsteps, I graduated in 2001 with a degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. I’ve shown in many galleries over the years … Bucheon Gallery, Figure 5, Carmichael Gallery, Incline Gallery, AMuse Gallery, Vibe Gallery, Upper Market Gallery, and Dolby Chadwick, to name a few. In 2010, I took a partial hiatus from painting to pursue music, with bands such as Slim Jenkins, Royal Jelly Jive, local jazz bands such as the Cosmo Alleycats, to name a few. When the pandemic hit, I realized that I had been yearning to dedicate myself to painting once again, so I quit all my bands and got busy in the studio.

Most recently, my work was included in the de Young Open, a showcase of Bay Area artists at the de Young Museum.

Recent reviews and publications:
“The Comfortable Darkness of Felix Macnee” by Matt Gonzalez. Juxtapoz,
March 2023

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