Dana Goodfellow is an award-winning, third-generation artist. Her keen sense of light is the unifying quality and primary focus in her paintings and prints. Describing herself as a “colorist,” Goodfellow’s unique ability to blend and harmonize colors was perfected during an earlier, decade-long career in the fashion industry working for Saks Fifth Avenue, Anne Klein & Co, and Blassport Ltd.
Although she often paints in the impressionist or abstract mode, her training has been in the classical tradition. She received a BA in Art and Art History from Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY, and has studied at the Art Students League in New York, NY, and the Silvermine Guild School in New Canaan, CT.
Goodfellow’s paintings reside in collections across the country and are represented by several galleries throughout Fairfield County, CT. She is a member of the Salmagundi Club in NYC, with members such as George Innis, Don Demers, William Merritt Chase and Child Hassam etc and the American Impressionist Society, Oil Painters of America, The Artists Alliance of East Hampton, NY. In Connecticut, she belongs to the Fairfield County Plein Air Painters, Greenwich Art Society, Lyme Art Association, New Haven Paint & Clay Club, and the Rowayton Arts Center. She has served on the Board of the Rowayton Arts Center for six years and has taught painting classes in both realistic and abstract art there since 2010. The artist currently maintains a studio in Darien, CT.
Artist Statement
As a classically trained painter and printmaker, my abstract and representational works are based on strong compositions, values and color harmony. I am a third-generation artist whose creativity was nurtured from a young age. As a result, I find inspiration in unlikely sources, seek out a variety of ideas to develop, and thrive on the challenge of exploring new themes.
While I have been painting for over twenty-five years, a career in the fashion industry has also informed my aesthetic approach. As a designer and buyer, I constantly sketched and re-worked design ideas, and forecasted fashion and color trends. To ensure that an entire collection was suitably coordinated, I continuously evaluated color combinations. These experiences finely tuned my sense of color and influenced my approach to painting. Today, a particular color combination often compels me to create a painting just to further explore the nuances of hue. As my creative process continues, a balanced, abstract composition provides structure and foundation to the painting. Drama is then introduced through the combination of texture, line, soft and hard edges, a variety of brushstrokes, washes, glazes, and the tension that emerges from mixing techniques and media to achieve a desired effect.