Natalie Featherston,

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Looking for a new creative outlet, Featherston started taking night classes at the School of Visual Arts. Soon, she was deep in study at the Art Students League of New York and New York Academy of Art. She also did an extended internship with the reclusive painter Michael Aviano, who annually accepted a handful of students to mentor in his tiny one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Aviano was born in 1927 and was in his 70s when he began tutoring Featherston.

“He was so hardcore that the bedroom was his art studio. He didn’t even have a bed. He had this baroque living room, and he slept on a pallet that he stored, rolled-up, in a closet.” Of the curriculum, she says, “You had to do each exercise until he was satisfied that you understood the concept. He’d had one student who’d been there 15 years. After six years, he said he’d taught me everything he knew: all 72 studies and exercises in monochrome painting, cast painting, the color program, composition, flower painting, drawing.”

Featherston lives in Providence, Rhode Island, which she says has an incredible art community. The scenic capital city is home to Rhode Island School of Design, so there are five art supply stores within walking distance of her house. And she’s a member of the Providence Art Club, founded in 1880, which offers classes, gallery exhibitions, and social events for artists. She has a small studio in her home, where she creates her still life compositions. She hangs pictures on a greenish-gray wall and sets up still lifes and dioramas on a long table.

Featherston has several ongoing series. For the 20 works in Faux Sho, she painted pairs from various categories, including children’s drawings, comic strips, fruits and vegetables, and portraits on toast. Many of her pieces are small, such as the 6-inch-by-6-inch image of a green apple (Mended, 2021), which appears to have been stitched with red string. The stitched-up apple looks like it’s nestled in crumpled paper and packed into a small cardboard box.

Larger works include Best Face Forward: Rothko (2021), a 10-inch-by-10inch piece featuring a quote from the mid-century color-field painter: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it doesn’t matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.” It appears to have been written in cursive, in pencil, on a tattered scrap of paper, and taped to the back of an artist’s canvas.

For her children’s drawings, Featherston creates scenes between a little girl and dinosaurs, as in Be Magical (2021), a painting that looks like a crayon drawing by a kindergartner. It tells the kind of story Featherston says art needs more of. “You have the velociraptors, the tea party. The little girl looks happy but maybe a little bit anxious. The dinosaurs aren’t magical beings like unicorns, but they are trying. They’re [wearing] unicorn horns. I think it’s aspirational.”

She always paints from life, never from photographs. She draws the dinosaurs, stitches the fruit, and shakes the cocktails that appear in her paintings. She also creates fantastical collages. King of the Jungle (2021) features a monkey wearing a three-pointed crown, perched on a tree branch in a tropical setting. She has to “fudge it a little” for toast portraits, since she can’t get such icons as cult filmmaker John Waters or the ghost of Johnny Cash to model for her. Nor does she have a toaster that prints famous faces onto bread.

“I make a toast scale — toast five or six pieces of bread at different settings, from dark to light. And then I transpose them with a photograph,” she says.

Mark Migliaccio bought a toast portrait of Star Wars villain Darth Vader, called The Dark Side, about 8 years ago at Meyer Gallery. His family now owns seven of Featherston’s paintings, including three commissions. One of the commissions is a family portrait of Migliaccio, his wife, and their child as Day of the Dead figures. Another is just a single strip of bacon.

“We wish we had more walls,” says the Albuquerque-based writer. “If I’m in a bad mood, I look at her paintings and get happy.…She’s a master. The little knots that she puts in the wood, and everything she does to make [her paintings] look realistic. She doesn’t leave out a single detail.”

Featherston’s paintings sell almost as quickly as she can paint them. Many of the pieces in Faux Sho are already spoken for, bought by collectors as soon as they appeared on the gallery’s website.

“Meyer Gallery is privileged to represent many gifted and talented artists, but there’s one group of gallery painters — the realists — who never cease to amaze our collectors,” says gallery owner John Manzari.

“This distinct lot of artists manage to take their realism one step further and create contemporary interpretations of the classic trompe l’oeil. Featherston has devoted her entire career to this illusionary style of painting. And boy, is she good at fooling us all!”