Nina Belfor

Athlete At Rest

Medium: Oil On Canvas

Dimensions (In INs): 40 x 30

Country: United States of America

Out of stock

Artist Bio

I am a figurative painter who was taught by abstract artists and that marriage is present in all my work. Growing up in Queens, NYC, the daughter of a commercial artist, I studied figure drawing at the Arts Student League under Isaac Soyer from ages 11-13. I received a BA in fine arts from Yale University, working with Robert Reed and Bernie Chaet (my self-portrait is published in his book, The Art of Drawing, 3RD Edition), and got my MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, where I taught Josef Albers’ Color Theory class as part of my fellowship.

After graduate school I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, teaching drawing, painting, and color theory and participating in graduate student critiques, and afterward lived and exhibited in Chicago. I also taught figure drawing and foundation drawing at Moorpark College, a Ventura County Community College in California, as well as teaching figure drawing, collage, and color theory at the Arts Council of Princeton, in Princeton, NJ. Currently, I work in an artist’s collective in Hopewell, NJ, where the local scenery has crept into my repertoire of images.

I believe my own art education from such distinguished abstract artists as Robert Reed, in concert with an early rooting in – and love for – working from the human figure have combined to form my own distinctive narrative style of making art. Among my artistic inspirations and influences, I count such great historical painters as El Greco, Goya, and Manet, Ensor and Munch, and Beckmann, and among more recent artists, Freud, De Kooning, Colescott, Guston, Murray, and Bosman. These artists conceptualized the horrors and tragedies of our world with a sense of humor and humanity, which is my goal as well.

Artist Statement