PAUL FEILER
Frankfurt 1918 - 2013 Cornwall
Ref: CB 113
Untitled
Signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse:
PAUL FEILER / 5 5 60
Oil on board: 26 x 18 in / 66 x 45.7 cm
Frame size: 27 ¼ x 19 ¼ in / 69.2 x 48.9 cm
Painted on the 5th May 1960
Provenance:
Private collection, Wexham, circa 1970s
Like many of Paul Feiler’s paintings created during the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as Summer Coast Cornwall, 1959-60 (Bristol Museum and Gallery), Porthledden blue, 1961-2 (Royal West of England Academy, Bristol) and Botallack, 1961-62 (The Box, Plymouth), this magnificent work is richly textured, densely layered and freely painted, its active surface dominated by shades of white with small areas of strong colour. The forms and colours of these increasingly abstract and evocative landscapes continued to be inspired by the Penwith coast around the artist’s home in Kerris, near Newlyn (which he purchased in 1953), the sea and spray, the cliffs and rocks. Bands and passages of black, grey and ochre, light and dark blue emerge from the scumbled symphony of white in these paintings, which Michael Raeburn describes as ‘the freest Feiler ever painted’ with ‘a kind of untamed beauty. They are among the most remarkable evocations of the wildness of the Atlantic coast and sea by any painter, with a universal significance beyond the specific coast of Penwith’ (Michael Raeburn, Paul Feiler 1918-2013, Lund Humphries, London, 2018, p.75).
Feiler visited the Tate Gallery exhibition of Modern Art in the United States in 1956, like many of his contemporaries, seeing work by the Abstract Expressionists for the first time. It was his friendship with the artist Peter Lanyon however, with whom he taught and exhibited, which most likely inspired his freer brushwork at this time, as he sought to place the viewer within the painting and the artist’s intense experience of landscape.
