Paul Feiler (1918-2013)

'Looking through a window, you make sense of that portion of landscape which fills the window-frame: you get a view. Stepping outside the window, you enter the landscape and find that it is no longer what you thought it was, but something far more complex and spatially limitless. It is with this experience of space that Paul Feiler's painting has always been concerned rather than with views of landscape, and if it is true that most artists spend their whole life exploring the possibilities of just one idea, then the elusiveness of space may be said to be Feiler's special domain' (see P. Khoroche, exhibition catalogue, Paul Feiler: The Near and The Far: Paintings 1953-2004, St Ives, Tate Gallery, 2005, p. 6).

Feiler had first visited Cornwall in 1949 and his works of the early 1950s became increasingly abstract and were influenced by the dramatic Cornish coast and landscape. Feiler explained in a statement in 1956, 'I have always enjoyed writing down with paint what I felt the world around me looked like. This has been a limited world; a world of wide open spaces, with snow and ice-covered mountains; later, the sea and rocks seen from a height. This has led me to try to communicate a universal aspect of forms in space; where the scale of shapes to each other and their tonal relationship convey their physical nearness to the spectator and where the overall colour and its texture supplies the emotional overtones of the personality of 'the place'' (see T. Cross, Catching the Wave: Contemporary Art and Artists in Cornwall from 1975 to the present day, Tiverton, 2002, p. 52).