Felida artist shares her ‘Fantasmagorical Journey’

You can help rename Rainbow Giraffe. Drop your idea in the suggestion box during the May run of “The Fantasmagorical Journey of Rainbow Giraffe,” an autobiographical epic in cartoon colors and arresting images by a Felida painter who likes to go by that name — but might want to take a new one, she said.

Renaming herself has been a lifelong pleasure for Cynthia Heise, who never liked her birth name. It started during her childhood on a Minnesota farm, where she disliked sharing the nickname “Cindy Lou” with chickens that wound up on dinner plates. That was weird and confusing to the young Heise, and she’s since favored many alter-ego names, from the miniature “Zot” to the grandiose “Waltrout Von Helsing.”

It makes sense if the latter rings German in your ears. Heise’s artistic style is a bit German expressionist, she’s been told: wild and absurd, festive at first glance but then darkly disturbing when you linger.

“I wanted to be all rainbows and long legs and long eyelashes,” Heise said Monday morning, while working to install “The Fantasmagorical Journey of Rainbow Giraffe,” which will be on display all month at downtown Vancouver gallery Art at the Cave. “But I was intimidated. I was always intimidated by everything.”

You can feel Heise’s terror and wonder in works like the childhood nightmare “The Past and the Present,” a pair of canvases crowded with faces in varying states of meditation and torment; “Hand Cross,” a visit from Minnesota modesty to her mother’s native New Orleans and a boisterous Southern Baptist worship service full of “crazy people yelling”; and even a collection of the scary faces of Heise’s art-school teachers. Heise was always afraid of them, she said, and their judgments of her talent. For obvious reasons, this one is called “The Finger.”

All of which may seem like a harsh take on life, but Heise was finally liberated from fear and worry by the ultimate harsh take, she said.

“I almost died,” she said. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

What happened was an aneurysm that one doctor didn’t believe was really happening (“You’re bleeding when we say you’re bleeding,” Heise was told), then was “repaired” with a metal coil that triggered an allergic reaction, came loose inside Heise’s body and did serious internal damage, she said. The end was near, she was told.

That turned out to be the second time doctors were profoundly wrong about her — and somehow the whole miserable experience set her free.

“The small things in life seem so much less important,” Heise said. “What anybody thinks of me is so much less important. Only the big things seem to matter — my family, working on my art, all those things, the things that give joy. I’ve even taken up the banjo again. I hadn’t played in a long time, but since we moved here, I’m getting back into it.”

Now 72, Heise lives with her husband and makes art full time in her Felida studio. Her surreal exploration of her past and personal growth, “The Fantasmagorical Journey of Rainbow Giraffe,” is mostly colorful canvases, but it also features a few dolled-up human figures — including a horned beast and a Queen Bee, the latter drawn from Heise’s favorite actual beekeeper, her sister.

“I’m very dramatic,” Heise acknowledged, looking around the Cave gallery at her phantasmagorical creations. “I’ve always been fascinated by all the possibilities, all the forms one could become in the cosmos.”