Characters World of Darkness: The Academy - [Mortals] Frida Elisabeth Ricci (Student)

[Frida Ricci]

Full Name: Frida Elisabeth Ricci

Aliases: Ghost-Touched (Chideran)

Age: 16

Birthdate: July 29

Class: Junior

Concept: Creepy Art Protege

House: Lancaster, single room (she'd share, but no one has ever wanted to board with her before).

Background:

Frida was born the daughter of a successful, contemporary British artist named Helena, and a successful Italian antique and fine arts dealer named Giuseppe. They met at a gallery show in Paris, and eventually married and moved to New York City when Giuseppe was offered a fantastic position with a gallery in New York. He eventually started his own antique and fine art business on the side, which eventually became his primary focus.

When she was born, her parents immediately immersed her in the art world. Her mother used to take her through museums as a child, talking to her about each artist and what the images symbolized. She spent time on the weekends and during summer attending art auctions with her father.

She had traveled all over Europe by the time she was ten, and has seen a vast majority of Asia and some of the Middle East at this point as well. She's just now getting old enough to go with them on some of their trips to more dangerous areas of the world.

She began painting before she was walking, and began showing serious potential by the time she was six. Painting is her focus, although she's also quite adept at charcoal, ink, pencil, and various other forms of trained media. She also plays the piano and the violin and is fairly skilled in both instruments, although it's more for fun.

Frida's main downfall is that she is viewed as eerie, or even creepy by most people. Perhaps it was all the time she spent doing serious, grown up things as a child. Perhaps it was all the hours spent alone with her art and her books and in museums. Perhaps it's the fact that she never really had a childhood at all. She's never really "played" in her life, unless you're talking about an instrument. Even her parents wonder if they didn't force her to grow up a little fast sometimes, but most of the time they write it off to artist's eccentrisim. After all, she is an amazing artist, and she has so much further to go.

Her parents encourage her in all things artistic and scholastic (for a healthy education makes you a productive member of society and only serves to give your art more meaning). She has already had two gallery exhibits in her life, and she has sold pieces of artwork. For fun she enjoys attempting to recreate the masterpieces for her own collection, and to come up with compositions that match her art pieces.

She was named after two great women artists, Frida Khalo (one of her mother's idols) and Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-LeBrun. She also has a younger brother named Caravaggio (named after Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio, her father's favorite artist). He is only seven years ago, and was a late-life baby for her mother. He is showing a lot of signs of extraordinary ability with a cello so far.

Description:

Brown hair and dark brown eyes from her father, but paler skin like her mother. She has a bit of an British lilt to her voice (probably from all those hours in the museums with her mother during her formative years). She's 5'4" tall.

Frida often has dark circles under her eyes from late nights working on her art. The lack of sleep doesn't seem to bother her too much, she suffers from mild insomnia and is accustomed to running on about four to five hours of sleep a night, at best. Her hair is usually disheveled, though not enough to get called out for at school. She rarely wears makeup unless it's a formal occasion. She usually speaks in a fairly monotone voice, and when she isn't wearing her school outfit, she usually wears fairly neutral colors - greys, browns, blacks, and creams, though usually somewhat artsy in design, like loose, simple peasant blouses and long skirts. Her hands often have paint smudges on them, and sometimes her face does too. She likes to wear various jewelry, most of it religious iconography of some sort or another that she's collected from all over the world on her travels.

She is often accused of being "Goth", which usually gets the accuser a blank stare. She is fairly out of touch with normal mainstream culture, and has questioned people before about what kind of correlation they're trying to draw between her and pre-Renaissance European artwork. She usually seems a bit flattered, but kind of confused, and wonders why people mention it all the time. She rarely seems to get excited, angry, or even depressed.. although she does usually seem a bit curious about other people, and especially other art. She's not anti-social in the slightest, and doesn't understand why people tend to avoid her.