Located somewhere among those worlds envisioned by Giorgio de Chirico, Balthus, Piero della Francesca, and Giotto lie the pictorial spaces we see in paintings by Lani Irwin and Alan Feltus. For all the similarities between the manner and approaches of Irwin and Feltus—and they are significant—their work differs from one another's. Where Feltus finds assonance, quietude, organic sufficiency, and harmony, Irwin often locates dissonance, disquiet, and dislocation. That is not to say that nothing unsettling occurs in Feltus's painting or that the slight uneasiness in Irwin's images cannot be cool, still, and almost tranquil.

*

One only has to follow the winding road from their house in Umbria to the gates of Assisi to understand something of the painting styles of both Irwin and Feltus. The church of Saint Francis of Assisi is a veritable museum of late 13th- and early 14th-century painting. The frescoed depictions of the life of St. Francis by Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini, and others transport one not precisely to the times of St. Francis but to a period in late medieval painting when artists portrayed a sense of gravitas—of weight, solemnity, authority, and earnestness. Here we find, in other words, a source for at least some of the sensibility of their paintings. But there is more.

Although Feltus's works in the exhibition date from the past six years, Mute Sirens of 2004 might, in all of its organicist purity, have been done at any time in the past 30 years. Everything in the painting—figures, space, chairs, background planes—fits together organically, creating balance and coordination. The perspectival space contains a peculiar reality of crystalline clarity, of stillness and quiet so profound that one seems to hear white noise. The low saturation of colors and the "quiet" (his word) surface of the brush strokes mute those sirens who enticed and tormented Odysseus. Here Aglaopheme and Thelxiepeia sit dolefully side by side, bereft of their enthralling song that led sailors into cliffs and shipwreck. They are mute and contemplative, apparently not even thinking in words. Their language and singing faculty is suspended, making the figures human in appearance only; for all their apparent mythic standing, they are merely mammalian and homoeothermic, forms in a carefully registered composition.

The theme of unachieved seduction continues in Mermaid's Story (2003), and 2004 Summer (2004). The artist's surrogates (essentially all the faces in his paintings are Feltus's own) sit idle and distracted in the foreground, while in one a mermaid lies insensibly, perhaps half dreaming of piscine adventures. In the other, a naked woman lies on a disturbingly short bed, her legs slightly parted, one elbow across her brow in a gesture of dejection and perhaps rejection. The disinterested (and perhaps uninterested) artist-figure in the foreground holds a teacup in one hand and a piece of note paper in the other. None of this adds up to a narrative, but the affective quality of the painting holds us in thrall.

Feltus has written that in his work the figure is important, the subject not. But saying it does not make it so. The bare bones of narrative bring about an unavoidable subjectivity in nearly all of his works, despite the arresting, demanding presence of the paintings simply as paintings. The problem is that human consciousness cannot simultaneously see these paintings as objects and stories. Our minds automatically judge ontology, which is the coefficient and status of reality, and therefore we see the woman and the man in Mermaid and Summer living in a material existence that is neither ours nor that of the physical work of art. Let us be clear: not withstanding Feltus's self-effacing, understated painting techniques and the perfect harmony of the forms themselves, these are mysterious and unsettling images. We can no more separate the image from the painting than we can see them both at the same time.

We see in Letters (2005) those things that are, in so many of Feltus's paintings, just odds and ends of a story; but here they begin to cohere into an arresting psychological charge. Sometimes Feltus the exquisite craftsman yields a bit to Feltus the man of feeling. Letters turn up in a lot of his paintings, and every time they do, we sense that there is a play on communication. Whether or not Feltus ever had it in his mind, one can hardly avoid thinking of Fragonard's Progress of Love (New York, Frick Collection), in which the young swain and his beloved cuddle and mew over a stack of billets doux. Yet, Fragonard's lovers never make eye contact, any more than do Feltus's. The image of the parkland behind the woman in Feltus's painting suggests the locus amoenus—or place of love—which is also the setting of Fragonard's brilliant, mocking visual essay on love. For all their invocation of classical love stories, these fractional figures in Letters never send or read their messages, never couple, never love.

*

Lani Irwin's world is more metaphysical than Alan Feltus's. Having said that about Irwin's paintings—and many have—what does it mean? The great 19th-century semiotician Charles-Sanders Pierce defined metaphysics as "the science of unclear thinking." If we were to take this apparently derogatory comment and apply it to Irwin's painting, we would see that the artistic thinking is anything but unclear. Her paintings are as lucid, calculating, and harmoniously balanced as any Italian Renaissance artist could desire. But the meaning, another matter altogether, is obscure. Because she gives us what in ordinary parlance we might call a "realistic painting," we tend to assume that it makes sense. But that may be either an illusion or a misunderstanding. She herself has pointed to the "disquiet" of early Renaissance and late medieval painting and commented that "I often do not know the particulars of the story, nor do I need to. And so it is with my own paintings." "Knowing the story" refers to traditional narratives that are part of one's culture, religion, and history. We may tell ourselves stories in order to understand life, as Norman Mailer believes, but many of us will admit that much of the time we do not understand life. In Gandolfi's Reading (2003) a woman in sheer leotard sits or stands behind a counter with laid-out Tarot cards (which first appeared in Italy in the 15th century), with their mysterious divinatory images. Irwin gives us the woman's head and body in clear bilateral symmetry, fully frontal, hieratic—that is, priestess-like—immobile, and inexpressible. Magical squares reminiscent of Frank Stella or Robert Indiana appear behind her, and a rose hangs from above. One may try to unravel the mystery, or—and this seems the more logical move—revel in paradox, irony, and "unmeaning." Not that the painting has a single square centimeter devoid of meaning in an aesthetic sense; yet, our attempts to divine the occult significance, although perhaps entirely reasonable, seems like an effort not worth making.

In Red Wall (1999) a woman in leg warmers and undergarment reaches with her right hand for her left fingers. Perhaps she is counting off the parts of a syllogism, like Socrates in Raphael's School of Athens, or maybe she is just stretching her index finger. The face in perfect profile is like an archaic Greek statue or an imago clipeata, the profile effigy of the deceased on a tomb, coin, or shield. The young man in front holds cards as if he were tipping his hand. And a couple of roses lie about. Roses, according to another famous semiotician (and Irwin's paintings cry out for a resident semiotician, it seems) Umberto Eco (in reference to the reason he chose the "Name of the Rose" as the title of his book) are, because they have so many associations, meaningless. But absence of meaning is as significant as presence of meaning. Irwin's title Red Wall deflects our attention from the two figures going about their business, whatever that business may be, entirely unaware of one another. The art historically-minded might think of Matisse's Red Room, which has some of Irwin's eerie implausibility.

Zoetrope (2006), three performers, saltimbanques, prepare for their gymnastic performance. They are reminiscent of Picasso's early saltimbanques, where performers idle away the time before going on stage. Unlike Picasso's, Irwin's strategy of address—how the image presents itself to the viewer—is dramatic, vividly staged. The balanced composition shows two figures containing a third as if they were parentheses. Vibrant costumes, long gloves, and the powerful squat of the head-line performer promise a choreographed performance of both delicacy and energy. But the drama has yet to begin, and the figures lack any kind of psychic intentionality.

*

Unlike many American artists who came of age in the decades immediately after World War II, Irwin and Feltus resisted the mainstreams of modernism (specifically abstraction) and leapt into their own versions of the post-modern. By post modernism we can mean that painting (for instance) is not working toward some goal. The early modern critic Giorgio Vasari (1517-74) viewed the history of art from the 14th century until his own day as growing from infancy (Giotto) to early maturity (Masaccio) to full maturity (Michelangelo and Raphael). More recently, Clement Greenberg's retrospective view of the history of painting claimed to discover a tendency beginning in the middle of the 19th century for art to realize itself, to discover those "increate" elements (such as color, design, form) that are peculiar to it as a medium and to pursue them. Eventually, this historical process of distillation would cast off everything unnecessary, everything volatile, such as recognizable objects and narrative, which are typical of language rather than art in Greenberg's view. Neither Irwin nor Feltus believe for a minute in Greenberg's deterministic and modernist version of art history, nor would they ascribe to Vasari's normative history. Irwin's and Feltus's choices are eclectic, beginning, as we have seen, in that period between medieval and Renaissance, and continuing into various forms of early 20th-century painting, such as metaphysical painting (Giorgio de Chirico), early Picasso, and surrealism. Irwin and Feltus are not just post-modern, they are beyond modern, believing that they are not simply dealing with an art that is only for their time, but for all times. It is not an art that transcends history—indeed, it is completely anchored there—but that avoids trends, fashions, fads, or vogues. Their art is sturdy and made for the ages.

please visit Lani Irwin's site www.laniirwin.com

Vernon Hyde Minor
Professor of Art & Art History/Comparative Literature & Humanities (Emeritus)
The University of Colorado at Boulder
Research Professor of Art History
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Editor, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome
128 North Stanworth Drive
Princeton, NJ 08540 (until June 2007)

'Objects after all are what makes infinity private'
Joseph Brodsky

The constants in the work of Alan feltus are so inexorable, so unyielding, that any encounter with his paintings returns us to the things that characterise and comprise the strange other worldliness and timeless solemnity of their presence: states of stillness, silence, suspension, intense solitariness, interiority, absorption. These states that the paintings embody, are: as states of being, and of relational exchange, the states they invoke in us. They are more than starting points, or touch stones; more pivotal even than being the subject matter itself: they seem to be the very modus operandi of the paintings existence.

'I paint figures, people in groups of two or three, and also singly.
They are usually in interior spaces, sometimes in the landscape. I make up these figures and their surroundings.' (1)

The personae (and more recently, the characters) of each painting are suspended in varieties of states of absorption. The forces that draw them inwards - including preoccupation and estrangement - seem to counter any possibility of movement. When they gaze, even when this gaze is directed outwards and towards us, it is not a gaze that anticipates being met; there is no possibility of encounter, of transaction. Tension, poignancy and disquietude often emanate from this absence of anticipation of being seen. Whilst aloneness is the prerequisite state of solitude, the essential state of absorption and of self forgetting; the other face of aloneness - that of loneliness - is never free of an accompanying sense of loss, of incompleteness.

' I don't paint from models and rarely refer to objects in my studio.
What I paint comes from within myself. I use mirrors to observe
various parts of my own face and body and occasionally I can find
some part of a photo or a painting in a book that will be helpful.' (2)

'it's nice not to compromise my solitude, my privacy, with another person present.' (3)

From the beginning questions seem posed by the paintings concerning solitude which seem central to the notion of dialogue within the work. What, for instance, does solitude permit that company might interfere with?

The paintings are made in the absence of the figure and of any objects that might appear in the paintings. The activity of making them is essentially solitary. The only dialogue that takes place, is that between the painter and the painting evolving. Each painting, beginning with the size and proportion of the canvas, is a way of entering the dialogue of what painting is. Nothing is allowed to diffuse or impinge upon the space of this dialogue, except those things that have become so fused with the self that is the artist.

Alan Feltus is mercurial and his paintings importantly contain references to what he reveres and loves in the paintings of others, sometimes as straight forward, declared inclusions: objects, part objects, the shapes of space and intervals between them, and sometimes as echoes, as kinds of reminiscent reverberations. Whilst some of these are talismanic, all might be claimed to be icons of interiority.

Some part of this aspect of the activity appears to be a carrying forward, a kind of mission, of running errands for the dead. A need to make space again for those things that might otherwise become obscured and even lost. An assertion that these things live potently still, as inexhaustible, full of reserves.

'My paintings are fairly carefully rendered , to a degree realistic,
one could think, while at the same time they are altogether invented images and have within them all manner of visual distortion or
unreality' (4)

What happens in his paintings have little to do with reality, or verisimilitude. He is not interested in painting what he sees or has seen. The use he makes of himself, therefore, to engage with parts of himself as seen in a mirror, in order to resolve and specificate the images evolving on the canvas, seems of profound significance.

When looking at himself in the mirror, he meets his appearance, approaches it, from the inside. It feels, perhaps, as much like: looking for, or looking into, as looking at. And what is seen are reflections, reversals; he sees himself in virtual space. In performing an action, arranging part of the body in front of a mirror, for instance, that of crossing his arms, what is seen cannot exactly correlate with the proprioceptive sense of the body. The resulting ambiguity, dualism and tension seems to have a corresponding existence in the paintings. This seems one of the ways in which the body is presented as an enigma to itself, and significantly also, this enigma is one that takes many forms in dreaming.

'I start a painting with little more than a sense of where something
might be placed . I then take it from there. when there are forms
to see I start shifting things about.' (5)

The paintings have a completeness that do not declare their history, even though their genesis is elaborate and difficult. Special things get relinquished to this process in which not only shedding but losing things is a part. At some point the paintings become "muddled and chaotic" and the phenomena of multi layered accretions might seem overwhelmingly at odds with the states that he works to give rise to, and yet, in terms of his dialogue with the paintings he knows the indispensability of this phase. For in the search for the obscured and for the things that have been lost, he is able to find: not what he was looking for, but what he wouldn't, otherwise, have been able to imagine that he would find. As if, each time, what he finds, appears, as though it has found him.

'I move things around in layers until I have what works in the composition, basically , refining and defining and searching for
structure as I paint. I think of it as choreographing figures and
objects.' (6)

Choreography - the moving and arranging of bodies and parts of bodies in space - is rarely without an undercurrent, at least, of the erotic. And, even more importantly, it is an instance of space taking shape from the dynamic structure of gestural forms: their varieties of interaction and interconnection. It is also, significantly, the mysterious experience of a relationship in which no one speaks. It is not, however, just figures that he is choreographing. For him every component of the paintings have gesture. Not only objects, but planes, boundaries, intervals, colour light and touch - as evidence of facture - exist to mirror, to converge, to concatenate and to hold; to create a space of stillness in which silence is a part. The structure of this space is unique to each painting. Their sense of separateness, as part of their essential completeness, arises from this uniqueness.

'I am reducing the range of possibilities - what can happen on the
the canvas - to familiar content: my own characters , my own sort
of light and colour.' (7)

There appears to be a comparative clarity and simplicity about the recent paintings that is, in the latter at least, in some ways misleading. Ambiguities and points of tension are less obvious and are slower in their release. In fact their sense of time, as space, time combination, in contrast to what was previously seemingly more multi layered and collaged - in reference, as much as space - their properties of the distillatory and the reduced: leaves time, not only suspended, but also, as compressed. The 'stage' is less dramatic, and the impulse to contrive and invent is made to serve this greater requirement for restraint, to shed all that might strive for obvious effect. The meditative is not simply depicted, it is generated by these paintings, and the seesaw of finding: the real in the unreal and the unreal in the real, remains untipped.

The paintings appear to have been formed through a process of reverie in which reverie is the subject. This cast of characters seem assembled for this purpose. As custodians of reverie, they become mirrors in which we may adjust our inner states, and prepare ourselves to see. In accepting the invitation to enter this dialogue of silence - in solitude, in absorption, in self forgetting - we may be able to suspend the impulse to read the paintings, and begin to sense, instead, that the paintings may be reading us.

The extracts from the writings of Alan feltus were taken from the following:

Extracts:
1, 2.& 4. from the draft version of essay: ' The Composition of Paintings: An Artist’s Perspective ' . Published in American Arts Quarterly, fall issue 2005.
3. & 6. Letter to Mira Gerrard, November 1999.
5. Alan feltus Journals, 28,3,05.
7. e-mail to Teana Newman, 14,5,05.

Teana Newman is a painter, who, in recent years, has worked almost exclusively in 3 dimensions. She studied Fine Art at Birmingham (England),
and Psychology and Philosophy at the University of London. From 1969-89,
she was Lecturer in Fine Art in Colleges of Art and Universities in the south of England, including Goldsmiths college, the University of London and
Maidstone College of Art. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Central Italy.

American Arts Quarterly, Summer 2002

Alan Feltus's figures seem both reticent and freighted with psychological meaning.  His characters are dark-haired and wary-eyed, and both sexes bear a family resemblance to the artist as depicted in his self-portraits.  The figures are deployed, singly or in couples, in simplified settings.  In Me and Mrs. Jones  (2001) a man and a woman stand close together yet distinctly apart; their bodies turn toward each other, but they stare out at us. Their body language simultaneously suggests intimacy and estrangement.  There is more fresh air in Two Trees, Two Chairs, Two Arms (2002), in which a solitary, contemplative young woman sits in front of a landscape.The geometric forms of the title provide a kind of scaffolding through which we view the soft forms of earth and sky.  We seem to have entered a world familiar yet slightly uncanny, idealized yet pervious to the uncertanties of human relationships. While there is little in these images of historicist pastiche, Feltus's characters have a courtliness that suggests the early Renaissance, an era that is part of the air the artist breathes.  Feltus, who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1943, has lived in Italy since 1987.  His adopted home, Assisi, offers a constant source of inspiration --- the Basilica of San Francesco, with its frescoes by Cimabue, Giotto, Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini.  In an unusually straightforward painting, Autumn Sel-Portrait, Assisi Earthquake (1997), he depicts himself with the rescue pass he wore as a volunteer in the aftermath of the natural disaster that devastated this beloved town.  In another image from that period, Giotto Earthquake Portrait (1998), the grave young woman in a russet smock and turbaned scarf stands in front of a simulacrum of a Giotto fresco featuring a half-collapsed church and a group of mourners.  Her long fingers reach out of frame, and she has the gravitas of the women at Christ's tomb.

The spirit of the early Renaissance permeates Feltus's work well beyond the occasional image-within-an-image quotation. Although his figures wear contemporary clothes and project modern anxieties, their emphatic, enigmatic gestures recall the stylized body language of earlier art.  Mural painters had to convey meaning and emotion clearly to an audience at a distance. The conventions of physical rhetoric---codified in the ritual movements of the Christian liturgy and the madra of classical India---provided a base language. But artists also used the spontaneous human gesture, the involuntary spasms that grip us when we are subjected to strong emotion.  Giotto effectively combined the two modes, as Moshe Barash has documented, infusing "gestures that appear to be 'conventional' with the spirit of life, of an immediate, almost urgent, psychological reality," while maintaining, at the same time, a "quality of emotional restraint" that carries the solemnity of ritual.1. Feltus's choreographed gestures have some of this quality. The elaborate positioning of his figures' legs, arms and hands hints at a rich psychological subtext just out of our---and perhaps their---reach.  His movement vocabulary functions in a private, secular milieu.

In a recent e-mail Feltus offered a few clues. In some images, he suggests, the represented couple could be seen as the artist as an adolescent and his mother, "private material I was interested in dealing with through the meditative process of painting," or the artist with "an imaginary lover, like Gorky's Self with Imaginary Wife." 2. (The Gorky painting, c. 1929, is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.)  Arshile Gorky's (1905-48) use of the word imaginary suggests the woman may be a manifestation of the anima, an ideal soul-mate, an avatar of the muse.  Another Gorky painting, The Artist and His Mother (1926-29, Whitney Museum of American Art), indicates how artists transform the raw material, not just of an actual face and body, but of a pre-existing image into the components of a painting.  The Artist and His Mother is based on a photograph taken in Armenia in 1912 showing the boy Gorky standing next to his seated mother in a photographer's studio. Through a decade of drawings and oil sketches, Gorky subtly manipulated shapes "dissected from the photograph" 3. to create a poignant memory picture. Feltus, who never paints directly from models, similarly distances himself.  The only exception to the model prohibition is when he looks at himself in the mirror.  Otherwise, his references are to photographs of other artists' work, especially from the early Renaissance.

The situations Feltus depicts include private encounters with the muse, an externalization of the feminine that comes, he remarks, "from the inside."  But the woman he depicts also has a number of art historical antecedents.  Wendy (1999) replicates the tilt of the head and hand gesture from Botticelli's Birth of Venus;  her rapt, slightly unfocused gaze has an intensity reminiscent of the twentieth-century eccentric figurative painter John Graham.  In The Painter and His Muse (2000) the leggy woman in a short shift has the grace of a modern dancer, but her delicate hands and etched profile suggest the Italian Renaissance. In an epilogue to a recent book on Piero della Francesca, Feltus's painting is repoduced to illustrate the long afterlife of the Renaissance master's influence.  Inspired by Piero's ability "to use the crystalline world of mathematical purity to describe the numinous quality in human life," modern painters as diverse as Seurat and Balthus have explored the mysterous relationships of figures in space. 4.

In Feltus's Time Together (2001), the almost naked muse sits on a simple chair.  Her arms are raised as if to arrange her hair.  Her legs are crossed; her feet do not touch the ground but hover, somewhat mysteriously, casting a shadow on the rumpled white material below them.  She gazes out of frame, acknowledging neither the viewer nor her companion.  Her profile has a classical simplicity, as if she were a maiden escaped from a Grecian urn or a Renaissance marriage portrait. The young man who sits behind her on a low bed has one leg drawn up; he holds a letter, blank side out, to his chest. The blank letter, a recurring motif, is an economical way of alluding to a breakdown in communications, or perhaps the inaccessibility of personality in even the most intimate relationships.  What the relationship is between these people and what the emotional temperature in the room at this particular moment maybe remain tantalizingly vague.  Yet the play of shapes has its own logic.  The room seems so shallow that the man and woman might be figures in a frieze.  Her bent elbow overlaps his bent knee.  His hand echoes the shape of his bare foot, which visually impinges on her thigh. The compositional compacting of body parts communicates intimacy, yet there is palpable emotional distance between these characters.

Feltus's figures may emerge from his own psyche, but they become known only through the process of painting.  The content of these scenes is co-existent with and developed through the act of composition. The artist explains, "I search for form and balance elements within a space that has always to relate to the edges of the canvas.  What narrative there is unfolds simutaneously within this struggle to find visual meaning."  The shape of an arm may communicate estrangement or longing, but that movement is also, even primarily dictated by a visual imperative.  The past is alive in these paintings, visible in the skill of the artist and in his subtle allusions to older artists.  Yet Feltus's tableau are unique.  His women and men have escaped the constraints of time to inhabit a world of formal purity and becalmed emotion.  "Alan Feltus: New Paintings" can be seen at the Forum Gallery, 8069 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles (September 6-October 12, 2002), and at the Forum Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue, New York City (December 12, 2002 - January 18, 2003). www.forumgallery.com

Notes  
1.  Moshe Barash, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University    Press, 1990), p. 13.
2.  E-Mail correspondence, April 2002.
3.  Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The implications of Symbols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) p. 29.
4.  Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Piero della Francesca (New York: Phaidon, 2002) p. 336.

Gail Leggio is Associate Editor for American Arts Quarterly, published by the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center.

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Alan Feltus, New Paintings

Perhaps because figurative art is out of favor with many of the aesthetic theoreticians of our own day, people have begun to forget that the figurative in painting, besides being a reflection of what we perceive in the world that surrounds us, is also a way of ordering our mechanisms of perception. Certain exceptions are of course made, in the very midst of this neglect. One is the work of the great 17th century Frenchman, Nicholas Poussin. The response to the great Poussin retrospective, seen in Paris and London during 1994-1995, showed how keen an appetite there is now for art of this type.

Though Alan Feltus draws some of his titles from classical mythology, his work, in contrast to Poussin's, is essentially domestic in theme. His characteristic subject matter is not the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon, but figures, almost inevitably female, in the studio, or in quasi-domestic settings. Like the personages in Poussin's work, however, these figures serve as a vehicle for what would now be dubbed "abstract" concerns -- a play of spatial relationships, a subtle balancing and rhyming of forms. To such concerns, however, are added others. These additions are what the choice of the figurative mode allows. Feltus's work often -- indeed invariably when two or more figures are involved -- has an implied narrative, which is more engaging because its terms are ambiguous. One painting in the present exhibition is called Moment Between, which calls our attention to something that would in any case be obvious: the two women shown are caught in a transitional phase, perhaps connected with the letters and papers scattered on the floor. Some action has just been completed, most probably by the odalisque-like figure to the left. Another activity is about to be initiated by her companion on the right, shown in a pose that indicates that she is about to rise to her feet.

The literal-minded spectator may perhaps be disconcerted by the fact that the figures, dispite their role as actors in a narative, are also somehow impersonal. The women always conform to the same physical type, posess the same calm Italian beauty of feature, and, especially when nude or nearly so, offer an idealized version of the human body. The fact is, nevertheless, that Feltus's paintings belong to a very well established tradition, not only in the history of European art (as my comparison to Poussin suggests) but in the history of modernism.

The comparison most often suggested, when Feltus's work is discussed by critics, is one with Balthus. A general resemblance to Balthus's paintings, especially the earlier ones, certainly exists, and one knows that this is an artist whom Feltus studies and admires. Yet there are also very obvious points of difference. Feltus does not share Balthus's perversity; his eroticism is of a different and less obsessive kind, his relationship with the classical tradition much more straightforward. In trying to find an exact stylistic location for Feltus's paintings I would point first to an artist who lies just outside the boundaries of Modernism -- to the figurative work (as opposed to the landscapes) of Camille Carot. It is significant that this aspect of Carot's work attracted little attention until the rise of the Modern Movement. It was Carot (almost as much as Ingres) who provided the inspiration for Picasso's brief but dazzling Neo-classical phase of the early 1920s. He was also important to the post Fauve Derain; that is, to the aspect of Derain's work so much appreciated in the 1920s and 1930s which is now, though only slowly, being rediscovered.

If Corot, Derain, and Picasso seem to be exemplars, so too do some of the Italian painters who flourished during the first half of the present century. Two who come to mind are Felice Casorati and Mario Sironi. These in turn refer Feltus back to the great artists of the Renaissance: Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Uccello, and back beyond them, yet again, to Greek and Roman sculpture. It comes as no surprise to learn that Feltus's own paintings are essentially constructs, dependent not on the presence of actual models in the studio, but on the artist's familiarity with the whole tradition of Western art. Poussin, essentially, worked in the same way. We know of no studies from life by him, but of many compositional studies, some clearly based on the engravings of earlier masters.

Looking at Feltus's work we enter into a dialogue both with "classical" aspects of Modernism and with the whole history of Western art. What he does is not only beautiful in itself, but serves as a reminder, more necessary now than at any previous moment, of the essential underlying continuity between 20th century art, however radical this may strive to be, and what artists did before the notion of an avant-garde was formulated.

(Edward Lucie-Smith is one of the best known writers today on international contemporary art. Among his more than sixty art books are the following: Movements in Modern Art Since 1945,  Eroticism in Western Art,  20th Century Latin American Arts,  Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Art,  ArToday, and  Art Tomorrow. He is also an internationally recognized photographer, poet, lecturer, curator, and art critic.

Alan Feltus - Italy
Foreword by Robert Fishko

When Alan Feltus told me, in 1987, that he and his family were going to Italy for some months, to renovate an old stone farm house they had bought, I greeted the news with mixed emotions. Some things were known, at least to me. First, I knew that Alan and his wife and two sons would go about their business with consummate passion and purpose. Second, I knew that some months would turn into some years. What was not known, and this caused me great, if understandable, anxiety, was what would happen to Alan's painting. Would he work at painting? Would he succeed? If the work happened, would the paintings change, and how?

 Later, Alan came over the the States and joined me at the opening of his retrospective exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum. He showed me pictures of the house - it was, and is, beautiful and inspiring, as history touched by an artist's hands can be. He seemed tired - Assisi and Wichita are many, many miles apart, even many different kinds of miles apart - and was first beginning to talk about painting again. I got the sense that seeing the exhibition helped him want to express himself on canvas, possibly to tell us something about his experiences in Italy.

 Since 1988, communication with Alan has intensified. His letters have gotten longer, mine too, and slides began to appear. The changes in his work are, like everything about Alan's paintings, subtle, fully-realized, and very compelling. The palette is richer and the mystery is deeper. To me, the Feltus women, doubtless familiar to all who know his earlier work, seem more accessible - more desirable, too, as if charged by the warmth of Italian sensibility.

 Some of the most important early Renaissance art in Italy is in Assisi, and Alan and Lani and the two boys now live there with it. The house is finished (is any house ever finished?) and Alan is painting every day.

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"February 2003, Assisi"

These paintings are about many things and at the same time about nothing more than painting itself. They don't have narrative content; they don't tell stories. What the figures communicate is not knowable, not to me and therefore not to the viewer. Or perhaps I should say what is communicated is open to interpretation and as such there are endless meanings. Endless possible readings. They are quiet images with unspoken, and elusive meanings. They are abstract in the same way instrumental music is abstract. They convey something. They create a certain mood. We feel something when we slow down and focus on what a painting says. They are readable the way the world is readable to us. We need not ask how we should understand everything we observe.

I paint without models. I draw upon many kinds of sources, but largely those painters, from ancient to modern, whose works have taught me most throughout my career. They tend to be the painters who structure their paintings tightly.They are masters of much more than that but, it seems, always masters of composition. More than not, they also painted from within. Or perhaps they, like myself, are observering art and nature all the time while not in the studio, and then while painting rely on what has been internalized. Each of us will have a unique compilation of remembered sensations  and it is how this material shapes our work that  will distinguish my paintings from those of the next painter. We really don't have all that much control over what we produce when we work from within.

What unfolds on the canvas evolves slowly. My paintings take weeks or months to complete. They have many layers of changes and then more layers of refinement before every element feels right in relation to every other. Form gradually defines itself in light, and light and color begin to work.

(From a letter to Arden Eliopoulos. Assisi, May 2, 2001).

I think art wants to be something people can turn to for a kind of meaning in their lives, or for a calm place within the turbulance of our modern world. Art doesn't have to explain our situation within the complexity of a chaotic and unstable society. Art can become social commentary, but it can also serve a much needed purpose providing a place of refuge wherein one can find a reason, or justification, for all the battling we have to do, mentally or physically, most of every day of our lives. After all, we love the art of the past for itself, generally being ignorant of the context, the politics, let's say, of the time and place in which it was made. We hold onto our favorite pieces in our favorite museums or churches, in our books, and we love to be moved by the beauty of something newly found. Art should have that kind of place in our lives. Art should be about transcendence. It should not merely reflect our surroundings like a mirror, adding to the clutter, but become something more wonderful, more meaningful than that. It wants to be remembered and returned to over and over again. Good art feeds us. It is so important.

(From a letter to Joseph Jennings, July 27, 2000, Assisi)

Yesterday I struggled more with the painting on my easel. There have been things about the space that hadn't been working. Maybe it made some advances yesterday. Painting can move very slowly for me. Lani's as well. But painting is the one thing I seem to have endless patience with. I know it wants to move slowly at times. There are so many days when nothing is resolved yet those days are necessary in order to progress beyond whatever it is that holds a painting back. The painting needs to reflect an inner self. It results from a meditative state, it seems. And those sleepy days at the easel when nothing seems to move ahead are essential. You understand all that quite instinctively, it seems to me.

(From a letter to Mira Gerard, Nov 14, 1999, Assisi).

About my painting, I don't paint from models at all, and not from still life. The exceptions are, in still life, sometimes bringing in an object like the coffee maker in "First Coffee" (in last catalogue) and a wine bottle and two glasses in a recent painting of two figures. Everything else is from inside, or without sources except for some degree of referring to other painters' paintings, sculptures, photographs, and more than anything to myself in mirrors. I paint a combination of self and invention, you could say. I move things around in layers until I have what works in the composition, basically, refining and defining and searching for structure as I paint. I think of it as choreographing figures and objects. Often I have a problem, it seems impossible to get the form because I don't know what things look like, and I have to move the head and start again, a different view. Its not at all easy what I do, but years of experience have enabled me to do it. Its nice not to compromise my solitude, my privacy, with another person present. I also realize I have more freedom, of a sort, without a model to observe. When I was a student I painted more what was there and less what I might like to see.

Alan Feltus