By CAROLYN BROWN Staff Writer The late artist Daniel Feldman died in November at the age of 67, a few months before an exhibition of 14 of his works at Gallery A3 in Amherst was slated to open. The late artist Daniel Feldman and his wife, artist Nancy Diessner, moved to Florence in 2020. Feldman, who joined Gallery A3 in December 2023, passed away last year. An upcoming show at the gallery will feature 14 of his works: “Depth be Depth” opens on Thursday, Feb. 6 and runs until Sunday, March 1.COURTESY NANCY DIESSNER When that exhibition, “Depth Be Depth,” opens on Thursday, Feb. 6, it will take on a new dual purpose: to showcase Feldman’s works and to pay tribute to his memory. Feldman studied at Princeton University as an undergraduate (albeit with a major in economics, not art), where he was a student of, and later studio assistant to, the artist Sean Scully, who described Feldman as “incredibly hardworking, very serious, very responsive and a deep thinker.” The two developed a very close friendship. “I would say that he was a kind of all-round wonderful human being,” Scully said. “He should be remembered as an artist and a thinker and a person upon whom you could place a lot of responsibility, and he would never let you down.” Scully recalled an experience playing squash against Feldman, which Feldman won handily, with a final score of something like 21-2. “He had tremendous skill,” said Scully. “He was cerebral, yet athletic.” COURTESY GALLERY A3“Cityscape,” (2024) by Daniel Feldman, who passed away last year, will be on view in “Depth be Depth,” Gallery A3’s upcoming exhibit of his work. Feldman continued to study art after Princeton; he got a master’s degree from Hunter College in 1982 (having met his future wife, artist Nancy Diessner, there two years before), then got another from the New York Academy of Art in 1990. After teaching art and art history at the New York Academy of Art and Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania (where he was later made director of multimedia development, then associate vice president for information technology), Feldman got a job at Brandeis University, where he worked as the vice president for planning and institutional research and vice president for capital projects, giving him access to many of the buildings-in-progress that would become his artistic subjects. (A 2012 Boston Globe review said Feldman was “fascinated by a kind of dark mystery that often envelops a building when it’s still in the process of going up or coming down — growing, you might say, or dying, its innards exposed to view.”) In 1997, Feldman discovered Photoshop, which altered the course of his artistic practice forever. The software, he said in a 2022 artist’s statement, became “the medium, giving me a set of tools that in many ways transcends the freedom that oil painting gave me for many years.” He would shoot photos (often of the aforementioned buildings), then use Photoshop to transform them into new works (often diptychs) that he would print digitally. COURTESY GALLERY A3“Untitled 301,” (2024) by Daniel Feldman, who passed away last year, will be on view in “Depth be Depth,” Gallery A3’s upcoming exhibit of his work, opening Feb. 6. In those works, Diessner said, “there’s depth, there’s nuance, there’s spaces, there’s emotional content, there’s texture, there are recognizable subjects.” “Dan’s work just kept giving and giving and giving,” she added, “if you allowed it.” That sense of depth in his art played into the title of his exhibition, which Feldman, a poetry fan, took from the ending of the Marianne Moore poem “Black Earth”: “Will depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no beautiful element of unreason under it?” The title works, Diessner said, not only because Feldman’s creations themselves have depth and invite a stronger sense of engagement than just “going up to something, looking for five seconds and reading the blurb,” but also because of the concept of “unreason”: “Art is not something that comes from reason.” She and Feldman joined the artist-run Bromfield Gallery in Boston in 2009. (Both have also exhibited at a number of other galleries nationally and internationally.) Bromfield Gallery manager Gary Duehr said in an email that Feldman was “a rare species as an artist — very organized and yet still able to tap into his visual instinct.” COURTESY GALLERY A3“Aerial,” (2024) by Daniel Feldman, who passed away last year, will be on view in “Depth be Depth,” Gallery A3’s upcoming exhibit of his work, opening Feb. 6. “I’m sure Dan influenced many lives and artistic views along his journey,” Duehr said. “He was a calm influence, a rock — but one with a unique vision. His legacy lives on at Bromfield Gallery in helping us survive through numerous struggles. He is a primary reason we’re still here.” Feldman retired in 2020, and he and Diessner moved to Florence the same year. After his retirement, Feldman spent as much time as he could in his studio. (“It’s not that he worked fast,” she said. “He was just intense about it.”) He joined Gallery A3 in December 2023. On Thursday, Feb. 20, at 7:30 p.m., Gallery A3 will host an Art Forum on Zoom to allow guests to “share thoughtful connections and responses that come from looking at Dan’s work, letting it affect you, the viewer, and speak to your entire being — heart, mind, and body,” according to a press release. Feldman wasn’t sure if he wanted the gallery to host an Art Forum, but Diessner hopes it’ll be an opportunity for art lovers to talk about Feldman and honor his work and legacy. COURTESY GALLERY A3“Museum,” (2024) by Daniel Feldman, who passed away last year, will be on view in “Depth be Depth,” Gallery A3’s upcoming exhibit of his work. “He was a deeply kind person and had an openness. He listened to people, he was very attentive and caring, and I think that overlapped into his work in the sense that he had very clear ideas about what a work of art for him was about,” she said. “It wasn’t about something fast or easy. It was really about bringing that attention and thoughtfulness and care to looking at a work of art.” “Depth Be Depth” opens on Thursday, Feb. 6, and runs through Sunday, March 1. Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].