Artist Profile: Felisa Flecker

It took a few months before Felisa Flecker realized what she was painting.

The artist, 72, found that her creation was a monochromatic blue canvas. But after some reflection, she saw what she had painted.

“I realized that this was a dog from my childhood,” said Flecker. “The dog had followed my father one day and never came back. I grieved for that dog.”

Figures emerged showing a child whistling and several images of dogs in a dark blue night sky. The painting was called “Searching in the Night.”

Flecker, a local artist whose works were recently shown at the , said that when she paints, she feels “relaxed. I forget about everything and anything that surrounds me. I just go to another plane.”

“I don’t think about what I’m doing,” she said. “What I’m thinking just comes out. I don’t plan it. There are no frontiers in art.”

Art has always been a part of Flecker’s life. Growing up in Cuba, she would do charcoal and pencil drawings of anything she saw. When she moved to Baltimore in 1958, she began taking art classes and was inspired by many of her teachers.

“I was scared to start, I was scared I wasn’t good enough,” Flecker said.

She later moved to Florida, where she studied at one of her teacher’s exclusive private studios for five years. After her husband passed away, she longed to be close to her children and returned to the Baltimore area, where she was commissioned to paint, showed her work in local galleries and even hung her paintings in restaurants.

But many of her works are inspired by those years in Florida. Vibrant watercolors of flowers, birds and beach scenes cover the walls in her Reisterstown home.

“This was a photo I took where I [was] interested in this child’s hands,” she said, pointing at a large watercolor of a toddler playing at a beach. She moves on to a painting of irises. “I took a photo of these flowers when I was visiting a friend in New York and they had these little stripes, not like normal irises.”

Flecker’s style moved onto collages and abstract impressionism, which she calls “expressionism” because it “comes from your heart.” A 92-year-old teacher taught her about collages and helped her produce several pieces of overlapping, almost Picasso-like faces and bodies.

“He told me to pick up a stick and start drawing with ink, and I walked out of the class I was so frustrated,” she said. “But he said ‘oh this is beautiful!’ So I cut the figures out and added some touches and it became ‘An Evening at the Opera.’”

Despite her patrons, Flecker remains attached to many of her works. She goes from room to room pulling framed work out of boxes, from behind doors and off the walls. Several remind her of her childhood.

“I was doing a lot of clowns because it reminded me of the circus when I was a kid,” Flecker said.

Sure enough, two clown paintings can be found in her small studio and two of trapeze artists lean against her living room wall. Her studio serves as her classroom, where she teaches art to the young and old and works on her many projects—and she does not plan on stopping any time soon.

“I will paint until I cannot paint anymore,” she said.