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 (B.F.A. 1966), and Yale University (M.F.A. 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 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in Painting, and the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award from Cooper Union.
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.
