Paul Feiler b.1918

Paul Feiler visited Cornwall for the first time in 1949 and four years later had decided to settle there permanently. Just as the mountains of Germany had fascinated him as a child, the drama of the Atlantic coastline of West Penwith, its light and landscape made a connection with Feiler that was to have a profound effect on the course of his painting. Like many of his fellow artists associated with St Ives, Feiler's interest was not in views but in creating a response to the experience of the landscape. Inspired by natural forms and drawing on external sources, his work during the early 1950s became increasingly abstract as he developed a means of rendering his environment in pictorial terms within a peculiarly Cornish palette of whites and blues, slate greys and bracken browns. In these early works, we also see Feiler beginning to explore the dichotomous concerns that have become a hallmark of his painting ever since - light against shadow, solids against fluids, geometric against organic forms, soft edges against sharp, the imagined against the real.

Feiler's paintings of the early Cornish period were first exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in 1953. Atlantic Island sold there along with every other work in the show, including one to the Arts Council Collection. The proceeds of this sell-out show allowed Feiler to acquire the disused chapel at Kerris, near Paul, where he still lives with his wife and fellow painter Catharine Armitage.