Floating Forms, Blue

In the early 1960s, Paul Feiler was starting to shift away from an abstraction centred on place, usually familiar coves and clifftops along the Cornish coastline, towards a more elusive concept of space and light. Floating Forms, Blue comes from this transitory time, concerned with finding space within the interior of the canvas through a geometry of forms, while retaining a painterly language that relates to a direct engagement with landscape. At this point Feiler was closely involved with the modernists of St Ives, working in a disused chapel in nearby Kerris, and was employing a looser, more confident handling of paint embodied in the present work. It demonstrates his mastery of paint, the more expansive style perhaps reflecting his friendship and close artistic dialogue with Peter Lanyon, who had taken up gliding and was making abstract pictures of wind, sky and earth.

In Floating Forms, Blue, white paint covers most of the canvas, the arrangement of rounded and elliptical forms delineated in accents of bright blue, greys, black and ochre. Feiler would often work on a painting for over a year, moving through several stages before a defined form was realised. Earlier forms and structures echo through the layers of paint; it is a complex and richly worked surface, lending a restless dynamism that distinguishes Feiler’s painting. Feiler was by now Head of Painting at the West of England College of Art, and his growing reputation in America led Mark Rothko to visit his studio a few years earlier. Meanwhile in Britain, his inclusion in the Tate Gallery’s 1961 exhibition, British Painting in the 1960s, recognised his contribution as an eminent figure in post-war British abstraction.