Paul Feiler Jul 22nd 2013, 11:06
Abstract artist whose paintings resembled sea symphonies and mystical portals
The Anglo-German painter Paul Feiler often called himself "the last of the Mohicans" – in his case, referring to the generation of painters who developed St Ives's reputation as an artistic centre, building on the achievements of such figures as Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. Feiler was at the heart of this community, which also included Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Patrick Heron, and he remained active in Cornwall until his death aged 95.
Feiler's style was for many years lyrical, with harmonious tones and shapes that, for all their abstraction, were based on his experience of the natural world, as in Atlantic Black (1961-63). In his final decades, he developed a more geometric idiom, creating paintings that were framed to look like portals, as if opening into a hidden, shrine-like space remote from everyday reality. This mystical emphasis informed his final series of square reliefs in acrylic sheet, which were recently exhibited at the Redfern Gallery in London.
Feiler was born in Frankfurt to cultured, liberal parents, who collected paintings and encouraged their son's early interest in art. With the rise of the Nazis, he was sent by his family in 1933 to Zwolle in the Netherlands, before finishing his secondary education at Canford school in Dorset. Feiler's parents followed their son to England in 1936. His father, Erich, opened a dental practice in Harley Street while Feiler began his artistic training at the Slade School of Fine Art.
After the shock of internment at the beginning of the second world war, first on the Isle of Wight and then in Canada, Feiler took a teaching job at Eastbourne college, which had been evacuated to Oxford for the duration of the war. Then, from 1946, he taught at the West of England College of Art (now the Royal West of England Academy) in Bristol. By this time he had also married his first wife, the accomplished figurative painter June Miles.
Despite initial tensions between Feiler and his more conservative colleagues, he taught at Bristol for much of his career. However, he found his main sources of inspiration further west, in Cornwall, which he first visited in 1949. As well as being inspired by the Atlantic scenery and light, he began important friendships there, notably with Lanyon, who employed Feiler some years later at the summer school that he co-founded in St Ives.
Feiler attracted the interest of Heron, who reviewed his first solo show at the Redfern Gallery in 1953. This was so successful that Feiler was able to buy a disused chapel at Kerris, near Penzance, which he converted into a home and studio. It was followed a year later by his first individual exhibition in America, at the Obelisk Gallery in Washington.
It is perhaps not surprising that Feiler's expressive abstract forms endeared him to the American art scene of this period, even though his pictures are more like sea symphonies than actual examples of action or colour field painting. In the summer of 1958 he even received a visit, as did Lanyon, from Mark Rothko.
Although Feiler's commercial success waned in the late 1950s, he received an Arts Council award towards the end of the 60s to supplement his income from teaching. The resulting work at Kerris was marked by a transformation from a gestural handling of paint to a more controlled form of abstraction. Feiler began creating thinly glazed surfaces in which superimposed squares gave a subtle interplay of projection and recession. The sense of enclosure was intended to evoke the sacred areas of classical temples, as is made clear by the title given to the Adytum/Aduton paintings of 1969. The austerity of Feiler's compositions was emphasised by their carefully gradated tones, although recent examples were enlivened by the use of gold or silver leaf, as in Zenytum I (2011).
After he and Miles divorced, Feiler married, in 1970, the painter Catharine Armitage, whom he immediately took on a tour of classical Sicily. Eventually he reduced his timetable of teaching in Bristol so that the couple could settle in the Kerris area, where in 1975 they acquired a converted barn that had been used as a studio by the Victorian painter Stanhope Forbes, as well as by Feiler's friend Bryan Wynter.
During the 80s, Feiler gave up teaching, beginning a long, creative retirement that included some major retrospectives. In 1990 he held a show at Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, which was followed three years later by an exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, where he had made such a significant breakthrough early in his career. Feiler's appearances at the Redfern then continued regularly up to this year. In 2005 Tate St Ives put on The Near and the Far, an exploration of his art over six decades.
Feiler is survived by Catharine and their twin sons, Hugo and Adam, and three children, Christine, Anthony and Helen, from his first marriage.
• Paul Feiler, artist, born 30 April 1918; died 8 July 2013
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