There is something about Paul Feiler’s work that grabs me in a way that is profound, almost visceral...I’ve known his work and loved it since university days, but a few years ago I was working with a student who decided to make him the subject of an in depth personal study. We spent many many hours unpicking his pieces and trying to understand how they had been made, which order the paint had been applied and how, examining his colour palette and trying to understand his working methods....it was fascinating, and the work has had a very special hold over me ever since.

The Hepworth, Wakefield has one of Feiler’s paintings, “Newlyn” in its permanent collection. When you spend time with it, looking close up at it’s highly textured surface, and seeing the artist’s marks with brush and palette knife, only then do you realise the complexity of his work, the skill and intellect that lie behind a piece that seems, at first glance very simple. The painting depicts the old harbour in Newlyn and dates back to 1958. In it we see blocks of solid colour, suggestive of harbour walls, simplified boat shapes and above all large expanses of light, water and air....the colour palette is very limited; consisting of subtle modulations of white, a rich dark with black and Payne’s Grey and smaller blocks of a brighter blue and fragments of red.

Paul Feiler is inextricably linked with Cornwall, and associated with the St Ives group of artists, especially Peter Lanyon, but he was actually born in Frankfurt just before the end of World War I, and had early memories of visiting his Grandmother in the Alps near Garmisch. His background was comfortable, educated and liberal...Feiler’s parents collected paintings, and encouraged their son’s interest in Art. Like many other artists of his generation he sought refuge in the UK as the rise of Fascism made life in Germany more difficult. Paul Feiler studied at the Slade, but then had to endure the shock of internment as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man and then in Canada-despite the fact he and his family had no Nazi sympathies whatsoever. After the war he settled in the UK, and began a long and successful teaching career, notably ending up as Head of Painting at the West of England College of Art in Bristol. I was a student there myself, and missed him by a few years, which is an enormous regret!

Introduction to the Artist Paul Feiler (published in PaintersTUBES magazine)