Art and Illness

 

Art was a great source of comfort for Felix throughout his illness. He had an immense depth to his emotions, yet he was fiercely introverted. As one of his friends and colleagues said, “Felix lived and breathed art. There was no separation between the two.” It only made sense that he would turn to art even more during his battle with terminal cancer.

Felix had just started a job as an art director with Anthropologie, and was being trained as an art director for one of the high volume Manhattan stores when he was diagnosed in December of 2017. He had been working frantically on his designs for the upcoming spring window even with a large pleural effusion around his left lung that had completely collapsed it leaving him constantly short of breath and coughing. He didn’t cry when he was given his Mesothelioma diagnosis but he did cry when he had to quit his job to undergo aggressive treatment.

A few months later, after 3 surgeries and 5 weeks of radiation, as he started aggressive chemotherapy and an experimental drug therapy, Felix took on a job making headpieces for a production of Peter Pan at Bard College. He didn’t let on that he was sick to the production team so they wouldn’t worry about him creating them while he had dangerously low white blood cell counts requiring daily Neulasta injections and was going through rigorous legal depositions and hauling headpiece supplies back and forth on the subway. His pieces were a huge success, especially the disco ball headpiece for Tinkerbell which was often called “the star of the show.” For Felix it was more than just an individual job, it was a return to a little piece of his former life and love.

Felix also created art to deal with his complicated emotions during this time. He created a Love collage as a type of vision board of his hopes for the future. His sunset on the beach painting was made to express the joy and solace he found there. And the self portrait of his battered body shows his inner conflict between his struggle to live and the heartache over the destruction of his once vibrant and beautiful body in this dark, ominous painting.