"Hawaii II", 1988

Elaine Kaufman Feiner was born in 1922 in New York City and studied at the New York School of Fine Arts and Washington University's School of Fine Arts. After her move to Connecticut with her husband and two children, she became active in the Silvermine Guild of Art in New Canaan and a regular contributor to the local and regional art scene. She became known for her use of color, and the renowned Hungarian-American painter Gabor Peterdi was a mentor. He wrote that "one can learn to paint well, but colorists are born. To be a real colorist...is an elusive gift that defies rational analysis. Elaine Kaufman Feiner has this gift. She is a real painter in the best sense of the word."

Feiner was quite prolific in the 1960s. Morton May, of the May Department stores family, collected her work and donated a painting (Pale Scintillate, 1968) to the Weatherspoon Gallery at University of North Carolina - Greensboro. This painting was later included in the Weatherspoon’s 1984 show that also featured notable female artists Nell Blaine, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, and Cindy Sherman. Feiner participated in numerous other group exhibits throughout the second half of the last century, including those at the G.W. Vincent Smith Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Lever House in New York, the New England Pavilion at the World's Fair of 1965, the Museum of Art, Science & Industry in Bridgeport, Fairfield University and numerous galleries in New York, Washington and Florida. She had one-woman shows at the Silvermine Guild, as well as galleries in Connecticut, St. Louis and Pittsburgh.

Beginning in the 1970s she began spending half of the year in the Florida Keys, where the sea became a major source of inspiration for her work. In 1995 she returned year round to her home on the banks of the Saugatuck River. Nature was always a source of inspiration for Feiner. She wrote in her artist's statement that "nature is my theme and I am concerned mainly with color and light. The luminous quality of light falling on Sea, Land, Sky, Rock and Flower. It's an aesthetic experience and also an adventure that may sometimes result in Joy." Gabor Peterdi also noted the role of nature in her work. "She has a deep religious affinity with nature that she expresses in her silent glowing canvases. Her involvement with landscape goes beyond the recording of specific vistas...She can make the color sing, shimmer, pulsate -- and thus, with a minimal reference to the objective world, she can invest her paintings with the heightened reality of poetry."


Feiner passed away in 2018.