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For artist Dana Goodfellow, a Darien resident, becoming a painter had a certain inevitability. Her family tree features a striking number of artists and designers whose genes and influence helped shape her passion for the discipline. "My Uncle Tone Provence studied art at Yale, and my two great uncles were also artists," she says. "One had a studio in Italy and one in Greenwich Village. Although my mother wasn't a painter she was very artistic. Also my grandfather was a decorator, Humbert Provence, who decorated the big theaters in New York City." When she arrived at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, she heeded the family imperative and chose Art and Art History as her major and trained in the classical tradition of painting. But after college, she put her paint palette aside for a career in fashion. Over the years, her tenure in the profession included positions at Saks Fifth Avenue, Anne Klein & Co. and Blassport, Ltd. As it turned out, fashion had a payoff for her art. She describes her work in the world of clothing design as a training ground for refining her sense of color. Now that Goodfellow has segued into art full-time, her impressionist, abstract paintings of landscapes, the sea, wetlands and other subjects, have been exhibited widely and frequently won awards, including from The Greenwich Art Society, The South Orange Art Association and The Hudson Artists Annual Regional Exhibit. A "colorist," Goodfellow describes her work as sharing a "unifying quality and primary focus" of how light impacts what we see.
A member of several local art associations, Goodfellow has been on the board of the Rowayton Art Center for seven years and is currently teaching a painting course there geared to instructing beginners on how to use oil and acrylics. Dana Goodfellow's light shifting, colorful and soothingly lovely paintings can be seen May 20 - June 26 as part of "Westport Art About Town." For more information, visit her website.
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