Alan Feltus (B. 1943) was born in Washington, DC, and spent his youth in New York City. He received his MFA from Yale University. He has lived and worked in Italy since 1987. Feltus’s figurative paintings create a quiet mysterious experience based more on his own imagination than actual settings. Working intuitively, Feltus choreographs figures in enigmatic relationships, without referring to live models or preconceived concepts and compositional ideas. His imagery embraces a mysterious silence that avoids specific meanings. His belief being that paintings which are difficult or seemingly impossible to fully comprehend are the most interesting. Feltus has received many awards for his work, including the Rome Prize Fellowship, the National Endowment for the arts Individual Grant, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant , two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, the Augustus Saint-Gaudens award from The Cooper Union, and the Raymond P.R. Neilson Prize from the National Academy of Design. Fetus' work is held in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Huntington Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, the Oklahoma City Art Museum, and the Wichita Art Museum.