Lucille Femine

Lucille Femine was born and raised in New York. She started drawing for real at twelve, grabbing anyone that would sit still long enough to get a portrait done. At sixteen, she expanded into oil, painting mostly people but later worked on landscapes of her immediate Brooklyn neighborhood.

"I paint what's nice to look at and what I feel has emotional appeal. And I find that the degree of pleasure I get from a painting determines, pretty precisely, the pleasure others derive from it."

In her first year of college, she received a scholarship to study at the Brooklyn Museum, then went on to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the New School and the School of Visual Arts in New York. For a time, she studied and painted abstracts to find out what it was all about. She found out - for herself - that abstract expressonism didn't express very much, so she gave it up and went back to people and other real things.

Although she absorbed a bit here and there in these schools, the most she learned and took with her into life was from an elderly, compassionate teacher at the School of Visual Arts who taught her the basics of drawing and how to put paint on a palette. Besides these, she is self-taught - mostly from simply doing lots of painting plus a few books from the library on acrylic painting.