Alan Feltus was born in Washington, D.C. in 1943 and grew up in Manhattan. He studied for one year at the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and then Cooper Union in New York (BFA 1966), and Yale University (MFA 1968).
He has received many awards for his work that include the Rome Prize Fellowship, a
National Endowment for the Arts Individual Grant in Painting, a Louis Comfort
Tiffany Foundation Grant in Painting, two Pollack Krasner Foundation Grants in
Painting, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award from Cooper Union, and the Raymond
P.R. Neilson Prize from the National Academy of Design.
Alan Feltus has lived and worked in Italy since 1987. In his paintings, working
intuitively, he choreographs figures in enigmatic relationships, without referring to
live models or preconceived concepts and compositional ideas. He creates a silence
in his paintings and avoids specific meanings, believing that paintings “which are
difficult or seemingly impossible to fully comprehend” are the most interesting.
Artist’s Statement
I am most interested in paintings that have a balance between abstract composition and readable subject matter. Medieval paintings have that balance. In medieval paintings there is often an awkwardness in the depiction of figures and architecture that allows composition to have an equal place to the narrative. Those paintings, usually about Biblical subjects and the lives of saints, can have changes of scale and oddly unreal depictions of architectural space, and sometimes two or three moments in time within the one image. That kind of deliberate lack of adhering to what we know to be real makes those paintings particularly interesting. Renaissance painters a couple of centuries later became so able to render landscape and architectural perspective, and figures with their beautifully detailed drapery, that their virtuosity can distract us from seeing that their paintings are also about composition.
Work shown courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York City
Works on Paper
