Paul Feiler
Landing Stage Falmouth, 1951
Oil on canvas board
30.5 x 51 cm (12 x 20 ins.)
Framed: 45.2 x 66.5 cm (17 3/4 x 26 1/4 ins.)
Framed: 45.2 x 66.5 cm (17 3/4 x 26 1/4 ins.)
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The Line II (1949) by Paul Feiler
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© The Feiler Estate. A preliminary drawing of The Line II.
Paul Feiler 1918-2013
The Line II, 1949
Oil on canvas
30.5 x 46 cm (12 x 18 ins.)
Framed: 41 x 56 cm (16 1/2 x 22 ins.)
Framed: 41 x 56 cm (16 1/2 x 22 ins.)
Further images
The Line II (1949) is an important formative work by Paul Feiler; one of a series of ten or so paintings in Bristol of railway stations that also including The Tunnel (1949-1950) and The Railway (1949/50). Three years earlier, in 1946, Feiler had joined the staff of the West of England College of Art in Bristol and from 1949, Donald Milner, the head of the college, sent the artist out from Bristol to supervise students’ teaching practice across the region. Feiler chose to travel by train which presented an opportunity to work on a subject that proved pivotable. As he waited on the station platforms he produced drawings which later formed the basis of worked-up oil paintings, often covering the preparatory sketches with notes on colour and form, as he did with The Line II (see the preparatory drawing and colour notes in Michael Braeburn's Paul Feiler, plate 8). As Michael Braeburn observes: "The geometry of the stations, the curving parallel lines of the track, the signal gantries with their signifying signs and colours, and the arches leading to the hidden blackness of tunnels offered great scope for simplification and reorganisation".
Feiler later recounted the significance of these works: "These [railway paintings] were, unbeknownst to me, absolutely essential to the development of my painting. I just looked upon them as very interesting structures with railway lines going into distances through tunnels ... They enabled me to reconnect with the elusive sense of space that I had found as a child in the Alps, but it wasn’t until thirty years later that I realised that that was my salvation. Almost a short-cut and an immediate starting point for my next performance".
The railway pictures, three of which were included in the Festival of Britain exhibition at the Bristol City Art Gallery in May 1951, led to further developments in Feiler’s work: in subject-matter, to other industrial motifs – dockyards with cranes, harbours (such as Landing Stage Falmouth 1951), and even gasworks and Cornish claypits.
In Feiler's railway paintings and other industrial works of the period, the figurative subject is still discernible but by 1952/53 the artist had fully embraced abstraction and his love of the substance of paint was apparent in his thick impasto blocks and swathes of oil colour. By this time Feiler was recognised as one the leading talents amongst the country's young abstract artists and in 1953, from the profits of his first solo exhibition which was a sell-out at the Redfern Gallery, he acquired the disused chapel at Kerris near Penzance. Feiler continued to hop between Cornwall and Bristol for many years, becoming Head of Painting at Bristol in 1960 and eventually moving fulltime to Kerris in 1974/75.
The railway paintings, of which The Line II is a consummate example, are therefore an important milestone in any account of Feiler's story because they represent the real start, in 1949, of Feiler's path to full abstraction, to his successful career as an exhibiting artist, and ultimately, to Cornwall.
Related artworks
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Paul FeilerPorthledden, May 1960Oil on canvas61 cm x 102 cm (24 x 40.1 ins.)
Framed: 81 cm x 122 cm (31.9 x 48 ins.)
