MASTERS speaks to Fezilia William, artist and owner of the brand By Fez. Fezilia William explains that lips will always be her niche, but now wants to bridge the gap between digital and physical. Currently Fezilia is working on Non- Fungible Tokens, aka NFT.Text: Bart-Jan Brouwer
Online editing: Noa Verseveldt
Image: John van Helvert
"I was one when my parents moved from Suriname to the Netherlands. We came to live in flower bulb village Voorhout, which was a totally white community in the mid-1970s. We were very quickly assimilated into the community and actually I never realized that I had a different skin color. I stood out more because of my lips. At school I sometimes got remarks thrown at me like "Zulu," "Hey, fat lips!" and "One lipstick will never be enough. I didn't say anything back, but it hit 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 outline of my own lips. Didn't look like it, of course, but to my mind thinner "normal" lips conformed to the beauty ideal. Once, when I was seven, we were visiting my uncle. I asked for a sheet of paper to draw on. All he had on hand was a box of Kleenex. 'Go draw on those tissues.' I unfolded all those tissues, decorated the edge with 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 out of art. He was right. I made paintings in the beginning, nothing was digital yet, it was already a lot if you had access to MS-DOS. Your platform was the people you knew, via-via. Through the Yellow Pages I got the addresses of galleries, I sent letters everywhere, but ran into all kinds of walls and closed doors. I saw through the glass ceiling what I wanted, but didn't have the right entrances and, at my young age, also had a hard time distinguishing the serious from the less serious."
"There had to be a living. Through a temp agency, I was offered an office job in the iron ore industry. It started with two weeks of fill-in work, but they wanted to keep me there. I started retraining and even got my MBA in sales and marketing. i stayed there for quite a long time. Only I couldn't use my creativity. I put it in my free hours in makeup, baking cakes, everything. But the artist's dream had already faded. Until about eight years ago when I found myself alone. Suddenly everything changed. And I breathed new life into that dream after all. I scoured the Internet and traveled to fairs and galleries to see what was missing in the art world. I decided to create something so unique that it could not be copied. My lips! At first I made sketches of my whole face, but I was missing mystery. i erased the face and put the focus on the lips - mysterious, sexy and inviting."
"I was invited to the pre-opening of Hotel TwentySeven on Dam Square and very cheekily spoke to 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. His interior designer and he felt my work fit the hotel. 'The official opening is in three weeks. Can you make sure the lobby is full of your work by then?' I succeeded. And I immediately followed through 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 haven't seen this art before, this is so different,' were the reactions. '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. AsAndy Warhol said, "Art is what you can get away with"-it's just 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 into my art by using ingredients like gold, crushed diamonds and cut diamonds."
"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. Like The Universe, a representation of the evolution of the diamond: from dark to light you see stages from rough to polished, the core being a kind of star cluster. It is also synonymous with the evolution of man, from uncut to a wise person with many facets. Over the past four years, my work has also shown a little more now. I am currently working on my first Non - Fungible Tokens, which I took to MASTERS EXPO 2021. There I struck a bridge between digital and physical. You get the physical work as a "gift" with the purchase of the NFT. Of the first five NFTs I create, two will go to the NFT exhibition Cube Art Fair in Miami during Art Basel, where they will be featured on fifty billboards in South Beach and Wynwood. Great right! What else is there to wish for? Yes, even longer waiting lists, haha!"
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