Alan Feltus

Enamored with the artists of the Italian Renaissance, American-born Alan Feltus lives in Italy and paints portraits that reflect the work of his Renaissance forbears. Using a Neoclassical style, Feltus stages scenes in which stylized figures—usually pairs of languid women painted in a warm palette of yellows, oranges, and greens—cast sidelong glances that bespeak their alienation or detachment from one another. Feltus is concerned with capturing the complexities and drama of human relationships, which he conveys through compositional tension and visual clues that hint at hidden narrative, such as manuscripts, books, and letters. Feltus paints his figures from imagination and direct observation of his own body, which accounts for the simplified and timeless nature of their forms: “Because I paint using mirrors, observing parts of myself rather than models, I might say that all my paintings are to some degree self-portraits,” he has said.