My name is Felicity Cruz. I am a self-taught artist from Pennington, NJ currently located in Astoria, NY. My art journey has been a messy, non-linear one. Let’s start at the beginning. My whole life, I have loved creating art and my family noticed that I seemed to have a natural talent. My grandma used to call me an artist and I would feel so embarrassed. I told her she wasn’t allowed to call me that. I think my reaction was a little bit of sheepishness. I felt that because it was a natural talent, I shouldn’t be getting all this praise.
In elementary school I was part of an art enrichment program that would meet before school on Wednesday’s and I would ride my Razor scooter to school for it. I remember enjoying this program and feeling encouraged to create anything I wanted. We did this project where we each chose an animal to paint. Obviously everyone chose a dog or cat or something cute. I chose a spider. This was the beginning of me trying to complete an art assignment in the least predictable way.
When I was in middle school, I had an art teacher that made me not want to take art class in high school. I know this sounds dramatic and it was. I was being dramatic, but I’ll explain. Our first assignment of the year was to write our names and fill the block letters in with colors and objects representing our hobbies or designs that represented us. To be defiant, I did not make mine in color, I made all the letters look sad and it was raining in my picture. My art teacher did not like that I didn’t follow the rules which had to have had something to do with colors, and she gave me a B. I was totally mad because art is supposed to be an expression! It is supposed to be what you are feeling (maybe I was feeling sad) and I did not think art was supposed to have rules (I was definitely feeling defiant). My other gripe with this teacher concerns a project we did where we painted kids in a third world country who apparently had never seen themselves before (I am a little unsure of the facts of this because we had photos that were taken of them; couldn’t they have looked at the photos?). I digress. We painted these portraits and keep in mind, we are in middle school. I had a natural talent for art, but I was no portrait artist. They looked like middle schoolers made them. Anyway, my art teacher went in on them behind our backs and made them look better. The whole thing was very bizarre. And this made me not want to take art in high school because I didn’t like being told what to do.
When I was choosing classes for my freshman year of college, my advisor asked if I liked to make art. I ended up taking a drawing class. It was so awesome and amazing. I made really great charcoal drawings and learned a lot about making art, which was eye opening due to the fact that I was mostly self taught up to this point. My art teacher recommended that I try to combine my interest in science, I was a wildlife biology major, with art in my future career. She ended up stealing one of my drawings to use in an interview to get another job and I never saw her again. What’s the deal with art teachers!
My first job out of college was serving with AmeriCorps as a New Jersey Watershed Ambassador. This job was focused on serving my local community and getting people involved in ways they could improve their environment. One of the first things my supervisor asked me was if I was artistic. I ended up working with her and the rest of the staff at the nature center I was being hosted at to create an 80 square foot mural of the Abbott Marshlands. I hosted an art show to reveal the mural and featured other watershed ambassadors art that they had created during their term of service to teach science. It was an awesome event.
And that leads us to now! I am passionate about science, art and community and I hope to find a passion that combines all of that. I am on an artistic, scientific, entrepreneurial, the-world-is-my-oyster journey and I’m happy you’re here for it!