As a young girl, Felicia Roth wanted to run her own orphanage.
She built a dollhouse and created small children dolls of different ethnic backgrounds. She made them little apple pies from beads, created small paintings to hang on their walls and sewed small quilts.
“The dollhouse was representative of who I am now – that’s what’s so funny,” says Felicia, laughing. “What I find fascinating is really children, when they are very young, all of the things they have a desire to do and are fascinated with, as long as society doesn’t squelch it, that is who they are.”
Today, Felicia’s dollhouse is the basement of her Blue Springs home, a haven where she paints and creates jewelry and where large canvases display the finished works in a field that she says chose her as much as she chose it.
She created the first painting she was proud of at age 2-1/2. She finger painted at her kitchen table with green and brown and a touch of black. From that moment on, she says, she loved art.
“I remember my mom coming up to me – she’d been cooking – and she said, ‘What is that of, Felicia?’ And I said, ‘It’s a forest.’
“I remember that distinctly, and I remember the feel of that paint on my hands and the feeling of accomplishment.”
Growing up in Warrensburg, Mo., Felicia’s jewelry-making endeavors began a few years later. At age 7, Felicia wanted a Fisher-Price castle, but Felicia’s single mother could not afford the toy. “One day, Felicia, when you have a job and make money, you can buy whatever you want,” Felicia’s mother told her.
The little girl sat down and brainstormed ideas to raise money. She found a box filled with old jewelry that was to be sold at a garage sale and took it all apart. Felicia restrung the bits and pieces into new jewelry creations. She loaded them up in her little red wagon, walked down the street and sold the pieces to her neighbors in Warrensburg.
Felicia’s mother, Joyce Kuhn, taught theater, speech and English at what was then known as Central Missouri State University. An only child, Felicia sold her jewelry to students at the campus student union. She worked every day during summer months, buying old jewelry at garage sales, taking it apart and making her own works of art. (Joyce is now president of the Independence-based Community Association of the Arts.)
By age 8, a jewelry store in downtown Warrensburg had purchased an entire line of Felicia’s work, created from liquid gold bugle beads and porcelain hearts.
Growing up during the 1970s – a decade of great change in America – a young Felicia saw it all firsthand. She lived on campus in a boarding house with her mother, who rented rooms to college students. Felicia listened to popular rock ‘n’ roll bands, saw “fun and innocent” parties that her mother monitored and watched college student study groups.
“It really also taught me about things I didn’t like. I saw kids making stupid choices and doing things that I disapproved of – and I was 7 and 8. I think, in some respects, being exposed to that helped me to be a much better young adult because I witnessed all of those 18-, 19-year-old kids.
“I absolutely loved it; the best years of my childhood were living on that college campus.”
She grew up at theater rehearsals, bringing along her sleeping bag and schoolwork as Joyce rehearsed plays. A young Felicia slept backstage as rehearsals took place until midnight, saying that she loved every moment of the experience.
“I was exposed to so much education and so much political controversy,” Felicia says. “This was the ‘70s – there was a lot going on...picketing and protesting and you saw the Vietnam veterans coming home in their wheelchairs. You saw the Black Panther and military groups. I saw the devastating effects of drug use in the ‘70s, and it really made me anti-drug, anti-drinking.”
When Joyce and Felicia moved to Independence, Felicia attended summer youth art education programs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Joyce also made financial sacrifices so Felicia could receive private art tutorials.
Felicia says she continued selling her jewelry throughout junior high school and helped her mother pay for groceries and school clothes. Without child support payments, Joyce often had to work two or three jobs at a time, Felicia says. The two were best friends, but Joyce still did her motherly duties for Felicia.
“She wasn’t trying to be my friend. My mother was strict; she had rules and boundaries,” Felicia says, “but she also did not shelter me completely from the world, so it helped me to not be experimental later. I wasn’t so sheltered that all of a sudden when I got into high school I went crazy.”
Felicia, a 1985 Truman High School graduate, continued working throughout high school, and at age 17, she won the Junior Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Ewing Kauffman, the Kansas City pharmaceutical magnate and philanthropist. Her business was officially established – complete with a tax number – and Felicia now purchased her jewelry-making materials from wholesalers instead of rummaging at garage sales.
Also at 17, Felicia became an apprentice for a fine jeweler, which involves silversmithing and gold work, smelting, the lost-wax process and working with precious stones. Since her illness, Felicia has only worked on beaded and hand-painted jewelry, known as fashion jewelry.
For about 20 years, she operated the company Jolies Creations – the company she created in high school. She made fine and fashion jewelry and pottery and worked in clothing design. Jolies Creations was carried in more than 200 retail stores across the Midwest and South.
Felicia has traveled the world as a photographer and is a published poet.
She even worked in floral design on the Country Club Plaza during her late 20s – about the same time that Felicia’s health problems began.
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Her muscles were completely collapsing. Felicia experienced extreme weakness and paralysis, and doctors originally thought she might have multiple sclerosis or another illness.
She was nauseated, unable to eat most foods. Felicia felt fatigued. Though today she has jet-black wavy hair past her shoulders, her hair and eyebrows had once fallen out because of her illness. She has a petite frame with very little, if any, healthy fat composition, but Felicia says she actually just gained weight.
At age 29, Felicia was hospitalized, though it would be another five years before doctors diagnosed her with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She used a wheelchair or a walker on and off as her muscles failed. She says her paralysis symptoms were actually part of a separate underlying illness based on potassium issues, something she was diagnosed with only 18 months ago after years of experiencing it.
A tumor wrapped around Felicia’s chest cavity, she says, described to her as “the shape of an avocado with vines shooting off of it” onto her aorta, a lung and her vocal cords. Doctors literally scraped “the vines” out, and Felicia says they were initially unsure if she would ever speak again because of the surgical procedures near her vocal cords.
Subsequently, she received chemotherapy and radiation treatments, though Felicia’s immune system is now compromised. When she had cancer, she was quarantined in the house for nine months because of her lacking immune system.
She wore bright colors on particularly bad days as a motivation for getting out of bed.
“You have to think of tricks to get yourself through tough times,” Felicia says. “I would literally pray about it and ask God, ‘What can I do?’”
She’s been married since age 18 to David Roth, whom Felicia says has supported her throughout her illnesses, calling “survival in the most productive, honorable way” their motto.
“I think she’s quite motivated to do what she does even though she’s got some adverse situations to overcome,” says David, adding that Felicia’s consistently positive attitude has helped her push through her illness. “She’s always in a good mood, and she’s always creating pretty things.
“She doesn’t sit around and say, ‘Woe is me.’ She just makes the best out of whatever she’s got left to do.”
Despite the lasting health problems, Felicia has remained cancer-free since 2001. She eats every two hours to keep her blood sugar regulated, sticking primarily with organic foods, salads, chicken and fish.
Felicia remains indoors when temperatures reach higher than 80 degrees outside – anything higher, and she begins exhibiting the symptoms of heat exhaustion or a heat stroke. Throughout the early fall, winter and spring months, she wears a mask in public to prevent the transmission of germs from others who may be ill – a common cold to others might turn into a sinus infection or bronchitis for Felicia, she says.
Lone Jack resident Tony Tycior has known Felicia and David for more than 15 years and performs carpentry work for Felicia’s business Dedicated Design and Renovation LLC. The business includes interior and furniture design, custom art and murals.
Tycior described Felicia as a passionate artist who isn’t afraid to try different media types and styles.
“She’s an inspiration to many people. It’s just amazing what she’s been through physically, and there are days that she can barely move, and she’s still up doing something,” he says. “She’s always creating something every day. I’m amazed that she’s still alive, never mind being as productive as she is. She amazes me every day.”
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The ideas visit her in dreams.
The most significant one took place shortly after Felicia was cancer-free as she dreamt of three world-famous dictators. The subsequent painting of one man would inspire her now-trademarked artistic style, Revealism.
In the dream, Felicia walked into an art gallery and was shown three works that she had “completed.”
“It was extremely dark and moody compared to the things I had done in the past where I had painted maybe landscapes or flowers or fairies or angels,” she says.
The paintings she had completed in the dream showed the souls of the individuals, “showing whom they were inside,” instead of a standard portrait, Felicia says.
“I find it fascinating because on the exterior, somebody could be beautiful, but on the interior, they could be not beautiful – and vice versa,” she says.
Among the three dictators she dreamt, Felicia painted the Communist leader Mao Zedong, calling her first Revealism piece simply “Mao.” His image on canvas is only visible from certain angles, tangled in blue, yellow, rose, green and other colors. Felicia constructed a small bamboo box that frames Mao’s likeness, a representation of his lack of thinking outside of the box, she says.
The Revealism style, Felicia says, is about capturing a moment in time that is special or incorporating a person’s inner soul. “It’s to capture a moment that’s a split second that is just spectacular. It’s a blur. It shows motion and emotion.”
She uses acrylic on canvas with real gold dust or copper dust, mica, glass or genuine semiprecious stones as accents throughout the artwork, which generally means they are considered mixed-media pieces. “Tango in the Night” features the faint outline of a couple dancing throughout a mix of yellows and greens and oranges.
“That style is something I cannot teach; it completely comes from inspiration,” says Felicia, who teaches art courses at Metropolitan Community College-Blue River during the spring and fall semesters. “I can’t teach that because it’s such an interior piece of me, and it is so fast-moving when I paint those that I cannot be interrupted. It’s so focused. It’s almost like a golfer who is making a putt. It’s completely in the heat of the moment.”
But then other pieces receive their inspiration from real life. The Picasso-inspired 2005 painting “Bone Tired” portrays a woman whose right eye is sagging, the lines across her face defined and the right side of her head exposed to the bone.
The inspiration for “Bone Tired” came from a near-death illness her husband had in 2004. She remembers visiting David in the hospital and feeling as though part of her face “was falling off the bone. I was so tired. I had been sick for years – and still wasn’t feeling very good – and now, I was so worried about him.
“Life doesn’t let you have time to recover – that’s the one thing I’ve really learned,” says Felicia, referring to her husband’s illness taking place not long after her cancer was in remission. “Literally, from one minute to the next, something is going to happen that you just need to ride it out. Just ride the storm out and don’t let it get you down.
“Life isn’t always easy, and it’s definitely not always predictable.”
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Felicia wants to dispel what she calls a societal stereotype about artists. She says society has yet to take art seriously as a career. She wakes up every morning and works eight hours like any job, and Felicia says she goes to bed at night seeking inspirations for her future pieces.
“Half of all art is courage,” says Felicia, adding that she doesn’t want to be remembered as a sick artist. “It’s not some great, luxurious dream job. It’s not a hobby, and it’s not easy.
“There are probably in my head at least 150 other paintings I’m supposed to paint,” she says with a soft laugh. “I paint every single day. Even when I don’t feel well, I make myself paint because I feel like to be a professional artist, I really want to treat it like a career.”
David and Felicia never had children together, and Felicia considers her artwork her legacy “that can go on after I’m not here.”
She still wants to travel across the world where it’s cool enough for her to stay outside, still painting and participating in art shows. Felicia is the chairwoman of the Community Association for the Arts’ August Academy of Artists show and sale, which continues today at the Roger T. Sermon Community Center in Independence.
Felicia says she enjoys her time teaching and working with interior design, opportunities that allow her to leave the house. She received the Patrons Choice Award at the 2010 Blue Springs Art Show and received the 2009 and 2010 Patrons Choice Award at the Lakewood Oaks Country Club in Lee’s Summit.
Her artwork has seen exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Method in Kansas City; the River’s Bend Gallery in Parkville, Mo.; the Phoenix Gallery in Lawrence, Kan.; Got Art Gallery on Third and St. Luke’s Hospital in Lee’s Summit; Alissa’s Flowers & Interiors in Independence; St. Mary’s Medical Center in Blue Springs; and the Velvet Pumpkin & Gigi’s in Lexington, Mo.
“I would have liked to have had a job that had a steady income, had maybe health benefits, to count on,” Felicia says. “Ultimately, this job picked me as much as I picked it due to my health situation and my life circumstances. We have to bend with life – we have to stand strong, but we have to bend. If you do not give a little and adjust to the storm, you could snap.”
