Cover Artist Nan Hass Feldman

Playful World

By Lucy Arnold, Art Editor

Oil painting by Nan Hass Feldman
“Boats Come to Yellow Sky,” Oil on Panel (24×36) by Nan Hass Feldman, featured on the cover of The Pen Woman, Spring 2021

Nan Hass Feldman’s works are stylized, yet recognizable, vibrantly colorful, intricate, playful, enlivening, and upbeat.

Feldman, an NLAPW Wellesley Branch member and founder of the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts, teaches there as well as at the Worcester Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Since 1999, Feldman has led and taught painting workshops in Dieulefit and Aix-en-Provence, France; Cortona and Cinque Terre, Italy; Skopelos, Greece; and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She has run the Artists Loft on the Oceania Cruise Line in the Mediterranean, the Baltic States, the Caribbean, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.


“Table in Sorrento,” oil on panel (30×30) by Nan Hass Feldman

Having grown up in Brooklyn, Feldman started taking art classes at the Brooklyn Museum when she was 3 years old. She spent every Saturday of her teen years visiting the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. She has a bachelor of fine arts degree, as well as a master’s degree and master’s of fine arts in painting. She has exhibited her work in more than 50 one-person shows and numerous museum exhibits, and received a Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation Award, two Worcester Art Museum Foreign Travel Awards, and a Basil H. Alkazzi International Painting Award. Feldman is proud that her work makes people happy and is included in 15 hospital collections around the USA.

In recent years, Feldman’s primary medium has been oil, though she also creates mixed media works based on sketches made while traveling. Her work reflects her direct response to and interpretation of the culture, landscape, and architecture of each new trip and teaching experience, as well as her love of art history, a trait she shares with her favorite living artist, David Hockney. She enjoys interpreting everything through her screen of selective seeing, playful detail, heightened color, and bits of fantasy — as Hockney, Van Gogh, Chagall, and Dufy do in their works.

For Feldman, art really is about enhancing and interpreting reality to create a more optimistic, luscious, and joyous world.