Reisha Felix

My journey as an artist started with a single sip-and-paint night that a friend dragged me to. I didn't expect much, but something about that evening woke up a creative curiosity I hadn't known was sitting there, waiting. Since then I've thrown myself into exploring different mediums, from acrylics and mixed media to digital art, and each one has pushed my practice somewhere new.

The through-line in all of my work is Black hair. Growing up Afro-Caribbean, I understood early on how much our hair carries, culturally, historically, and personally. My figurative portraits are my way of honoring that. I build texture directly onto the canvas using a hot glue gun, then paint over it to recreate the curls, coils, kinks, and knots that make each crown its own. It's a slow, deliberate process, and that's exactly the point.

Over the years my work has taken me to places I couldn't have imagined when I first picked up a brush. My digital design was chosen for the Region of Durham's 2025 Black History Month campaign, where it ran as a bus wrap across the region and landed me a feature on CTV News. My pieces have been shown in exhibitions across the GTA and collected privately in Canada, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. The experience that stays with me most, though, is painting two murals at a hostel in Tanzania in late 2024. That project reminded me why I do this work at all.