Welcome to the Sabby Painter Podcast, the Podcast for Artists who Mean Business.

Here's your host, Andres Wood.

Hello, it's Antries, and welcome to another episode of the savvy painter podcast. You are in for a treat.

Felicia Porte is my guest today.

Felicia is a representational artist who paints alaprima portraits from her studio in

Detroit.

Her self-portrait melting point was accepted into the BP Portrait Award show in 2015. After 15 years of waitressing, Felicia took a leap and decided

to focus exclusively on her painting. It's an inspiring story of faith in her abilities and

pushing past the, my god what did I just do moments

to become the artist that she is today. Felicia and I talk about the importance

of human connection for artists, how connecting

with artists in the real world as well as a virtual world creates a safety net and community.

And I have to say, I especially appreciated Felicia's candor in talking about a difficult period in her life and how the apathy that she felt turned out to be the thing that allowed her to grow as an artist. I really enjoyed

this conversation and I hope you do too. So without further ado here is Felicia Forte.

Hi Felicia Forte.

Hi Felicia, thank you so much for being on the savvy painter and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

Hi, my pleasure.

Can you tell me a little bit about when you first started considering art as your vocation when you really

started to say like I'm going to do this?

Well I think it was at 30 so I started painting at like 15 but at 30 I

was waiting tables for 15 years and painting on the side and I just couldn't do that anymore.

So I found that I was just having too many cocktails at the end of the night to forget about 15 years of waiting tables and I was like I kind of need to figure out if I can do this thing.

...