Nan Hass Feldman
Blessed by a love of life, an optimistic outlook, a very high energy level, a passion for painting, and a drive to put and keep my creative life in the forefront––I believe all this has gone into my almost forty-year career as an artist.
Since early childhood, I have had a love for strong color and design, regardless of whatever medium I used, be it drawing, collage, mixed-media, oils, acrylics, oilsticks, or encaustics. Regardless of my love for different mediums, my work is image-based and revolves around the house (both interiors and exteriors) and landscapes as subjects. These subjects are the armature on which I can apply my subjective responses to place and time, engaging emotions, fantasy, and fiction. I love to capture my real environments or those of friends, and places I’ve been to, through my screen of selective seeing, playful detail, heightened color, and bits of fantasy.
When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you. Your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics . . . and one by one, if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting . . . you walk out.
––Philip Guston
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Brooklyn in 1950, Nan studied art from the age of five at the Brooklyn Art Museum, and was a competitive dance and figure roller skater. Junior dance champion for New York State at the age of twelve, she skated until her fifteenth birthday, at which point she decided that she wanted to devote all her free time and studies to art.
She received her BFA from SUNY at Buffalo. After graduation in 1972 she married Alan Feldman, a poet and professor at Framingham (MA) State College, and accepted an art teaching position in the Framingham public schools, leaving a year-and-a-half later when her daughter Rebecca was born. Her son, Daniel, was born in 1976.
Even while she raised her children, Ms. Feldman never stopped painting. When the kids were young, she'd use mediums that could be applied piecemeal, such as serigraphy, collography, and collage so that she could pick up and put down work quickly. As her children grew older, Feldman was able to return to paintings that required more studio time and to resume her art studies. She completed an MA in painting at Goddard College in 1987 and an MFA in painting at Vermont College in 1993.
Since 1981 Ms. Feldman has had more than forty one-person shows, numerous museum exhibits, and scores of group exhibits. She has received many awards on the national, state, and local levels. She has also continued to teach at the Worcester Art Museum, the DeCordova Museum, and the Danforth Museum of Art (which she helped found) as well as at Framingham State College. Since 1999 she has been teaching painting in France and Italy, a source of inspiration for many of her recent landscapes. Her work is represented in numerous corporate and private collections throughout the United States, Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, and Sweden.
“Having grown up in art museums in New York City,” says Ms. Feldman, “and having taught in three art museums in Massachusetts for the past thirty-five years, I make art as a way of paying homage to those artists who have touched my life since early childhood: Matisse, Derain, Van Gogh, Dubuffet, Hockney, Nikki de Saint-Phalle, to name a few. As Philip Guston said, they’ve been my teachers. Though they disappear when I’m painting. And when I’m really painting, even I disappear!”