Nan Hass Feldman

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, been my teachers. Though they disappear when I’m painting. And when I'm really painting, even I disappear!"