Artist     Paul Feiler
Title      Landscape, Early Morning
Date      1982
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       50 x 59.6cm
Ref          141

Purchased in the 105th RWA Annual Exhibition in 1957

Other websites featuring this artist's work
www.uwe.ac.uk/amd/archive/pfeiler.htm
www.redfern-gallery.co.uk

Landscape, Early Morning
Paul Feiler was born in 1918, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He came to England in 1933 and studied at the Slade School of Art between 1936-39. During the Second World War he was interned in Canada, but returned to Britain in 1941 to begin his career as an artist. From 1941- 1975 he taught art at the Combined Colleges of Eastbourne and Radley, going on to become the Head of Painting at the West England College of Art, later Bristol Polytechnic. He later moved to Newlyn in Cornwall to be closer to the inspiration of light and landscape.

He has had numerous solo exhibitions including several at the Redfern Gallery in London, from 1959 to 2000, Arnolfini Bristol in 1961, the Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, in1969, the John Hansard Gallery in, Southampton in 1982, the Warwick Arts Trust, London in 1982 and a retrospective in 1995/6 at the Tate Gallery, St Ives. His most recent solo show was at, The Rotunda, Hong Kong Land, Hong Kong, in 1998. These mark only a handful of solo shows.

Group exhibitions include The Bristol City Art Gallery in 1950, British Contemporary Paintings at the Arts Council Gallery in London in1953, the Tate Gallery in 1954, the John Moore’s in Liverpool in 1961, the New Art Centre London in 1977, St Ives 1939 – 64 at the Tate Gallery, London in1985, Austin Desmond Fine Art in 1989 and several group exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street.

His work is represented in collections in Austria, Canada, France, New Zealand and the USA as well as many key collections in the UK such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tate London, Tate St Ives, the Arts Council of Great Britain, Kettles Yard Museum, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery amongst others.

His work, writes curator Peter Khoroche, has always been concerned with the architecture of space and the ambiguity of our visual experiences. From the early 1950s, when he became known for his gestural abstractions which were inspired by the structure of natural forms, to his recent work expressing shrine-like portals, ‘his paintings are sensitive constructions using space, tone and light, leading to simplification. His abstraction has consistently drawn on external sources, using light, tone and space to render an environment in pictorial terms. His work commonly relates the experience of a particular event through simple structures, subtle tonal harmonies and a luxuriously active painted surface.’

As Khoroche explained in the catalogue essay to his major show at the Tate St Ives in 2005, the character of Feiler's work changed dramatically. In the 1970s:

‘He began painting thinly glazed surfaces of mechanically organised geometric forms. Meditative paintings relating to recessive spaces and projecting forms developed from themes of 'the hidden' and 'the shrine'. Superimposed squares of closely gradated tone, latterly incorporating gold or silver leaf, have a quiet movement, the square and circle becoming the central motif. Feiler uses these spatial explorations of the horizontal and the vertical as a gateway for the viewer to make potent connections with the world as he makes it.’(1)

Feiler was very well known as a teacher. Speaking (2) of his time at the West of England College of Art in Bristol, he recalls that the late Ernest Pascoe (who was the Head of Sculpture) and he saw eye to eye on how a course should be run for art students. It was Feiler who initiated a two week field trip to Cornwall for all painting students where students were encouraged through his many contacts with the leading artists practising in Cornwall during that period - Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Terry Frost - to gain first hand experience of what life as an artist meant. Students were encouraged to visit studios and meet the artists in the evenings for discussions. This field trip marked the painting students initiation into the course at the West of England College and was a part of the syllabus until Paul Feiler retired in 1975.

(1) Notes taken from essay by Peter Khoroche to accompany the exhibition, Paul Feiler: The Near and The Far, Tate St Ives, 14 May - 25 September 2005

(2) Notes taken from interviews conducted as part of the 150th anniversary celebrations held by the Faculty of Art, Media and Design, University of the West of England in 2003; www.uwe.ac.uk/amd/archive/pfeiler.htm

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