Power
Masters to watch: Fezilia William
MASTERS speaks with Fezilia William, artist and owner of By Fez. Fezilia talks about her youth, her art and what her future plans are.
MASTERS speaks to Fezilia William, artist and owner of the By Fez brand. Fezilia William says that lips will always remain her niche, but now she wants to bridge the gap between digital and physical. Fezilia is currently working on Non-Fungible Tokens, also known as NFT. Text: Bart-Jan Brouwer
Online editorial: Noa Verseveldt
Image: John van Helvert
lipstick
“I was one when my parents moved from Suriname to the Netherlands. We came to live in the flower bulb village of Voorhout, which was a completely white municipality in the mid-1970s. We were absorbed into the community very quickly and I actually never realized that I had a different skin color. I was more noticeable because of my lips. At school I sometimes got comments like 'Zulu', 'Hey, big lips!' and 'One lipstick is never enough'. I didn't say anything back, but it touched me. I was so aware of it that when I first put on lipstick in the 1980s, I put on a lip liner that was narrower than the contour of my own lips. It didn't look natural, but I feel like thinner 'normal' lips corresponded to the beauty ideal. Once when I was seven, we were visiting my uncle. I asked for a piece of paper to draw on. He only had a box of Kleenex. "Go and draw on those tissues." I unfolded all those wipes, decorated the edge with a marker, folded them again and put them back in the box. When I'm busy being creative, I forget everything around me. Eventually I also went to art school. My father had warned me: 'You can't make a living from art.' He was right. In the beginning I made paintings, nothing was digital anymore, it was quite something if you had access to MS-DOS. Your platform was the people you knew, through-via. Via the Yellow Pages I found the addresses of galleries, I sent letters everywhere, but I ran into all kinds of walls and closed doors. I saw what I wanted through the glass ceiling, but I did not have the right input and at my young age it was difficult to distinguish the serious from the less serious people.”
Mystery
“There had to be bread on the table. I was offered an office job in the iron ore sector through an employment agency. It started with two weeks of raids, but they wanted to keep me there. I retrained and even got my MBA in sales and marketing. I stayed there quite a long time. Only I couldn't express my creativity. I put that into make-up, baking cakes, all kinds of things in my spare hours. But the artist's dream had already faded. Until I found myself on my own about eight years ago. Suddenly everything changed. And I breathed new life into that dream. I scoured the internet and traveled to fairs and galleries to see what was missing in the art world. I decided to make something that is so unique that it cannot be copied. My lips! At first I made sketches of my entire face, but I lacked mystery. I erased the face and focused on the lips – mysterious, sexy and inviting.”
Diamond grit
“I was invited to the pre-opening of Hotel TwentySeven on Dam Square and very rudely confronted owner-director Eric Toren afterwards. I showed him some pictures of my art on my cell phone. He gave me half an hour to pitch a little later that week. He and his interior designer thought my work suited the hotel. 'The official opening is in three weeks. Can you ensure that the lobby is full of your work?' I succeeded. And I immediately took action by sending videos of my glittering art and photos of the hotel lobby to galleries. As a result, I am now represented in Mallorca, France, Switzerland, Dubai, UK and Israel, among others. "We have never seen this art before, this is so different," were the responses. You see lips everywhere, but the materials are unique. Canvas with paint has no value in itself, the value of a canvas is determined by what the customer is willing to pay for it. As Andy Warhol said: 'Art is what you can get away with' – it just depends on what the fool pays for it. I didn't want to take the gamble that the value of my art is only determined by others: I put value in my art by using ingredients such as gold, crushed diamonds and cut diamonds.”
Jewelry on the wall
“My style can be described as luxurious pop art, Luxurious pop art. But I also call my art 'Jewelry on the wall', because that's what you get: a piece of jewelry on the wall. As The Universe, a representation of the evolution of the diamond: from dark bar light you see stages from rough to polished, where the core is a kind of star cluster. It is also synonymous with the development of man, from unsophisticated to a wise person with many facets. Over the past four years I have also shown a little more in my work. I am currently working on my first Non – Fungible Tokens, which I took with me to MASTERS EXPO 2021. There I bridged the gap between digital and physical. You receive the physical work as a 'gift' when you purchase the NFT. Of the first five NFTs I create, two will go to the Cube Art Fair NFT fair in Miami during Art Basel, where they will be featured on fifty billboards in South Beach and Wynwood. Amazing, right! What else is there to wish for? Yes, even longer waiting lists, haha!”
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