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Annie FEARON
See Anne Fearon WALKE
Hilda FEARON
Hilda Fearon was born in Banstead, Surrey, and was the younger sister of Annie WALKE, also an artist, and the middle child in a family of four daughters and one son. Some early information about the Fearon family is available in CAI files, as donated by researcher and writer Christopher Garrett.
Hilda began drawing and modelling whilst still at school, and drew Greek sculpture at the British Museum. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London, in Dresden under Robert Sterl (1897-99), and from 1900 under Algernon Mayow TALMAGE at St Ives. In her portrait of Talmage she shows him smoking and reading, Her portrait of Alice was the property of fellow artist Will ASHTON when Charles MARRIOTT wrote an article about her paintings and her early maturity as a painter for the Studio magazine.
Fearon made the representation of women in various pursuits domestically (tea parties, dancing, etc.) both indoors and out of doors her main choice of subject in her paintings. Placing figures - primarily women and children in both interiors and landscapes combined all of her 'cool' craftmanship (Marriott saw almost a frostiness, certainly a kind of emotional detachment in her representations/images.)
She and Talmage moved to London (1908), where she exhibited at least 18 paintings at the RA, before her early death at the young age of thirty-nine. Talmage presented her painting, The Tea Party (1916) to the Tate Gallery in 1936.
Yankel FEATHER
Born in Liverpool, the expressionist painter Yankel Feather was of Austrian-Russian parentage, and overcame a very hard early life to become the difficult, ebullient and sometimes irritatingly perverse artist that he became. His talent was enormous and Terry FROST, whom he first met in 1947 when Feather exhibited at the Penwith Society of Arts in St Ives, was to express it well: 'Full of talent, bursting with a trapped enthusiasm, supported by a genuine love of art and art history.'
His talent was nurtured by the constant visits to public galleries in Liverpool and London, and his techniques were self-taught and based on what he observed from the masters. Through various jobs and WWII war work, he struggled to make a living. It was not until he began to sell antiques and buy into nightclubs, that he began to make influential and wealthy friends amongst the 'Beat Generation' of musicians and artists, who could buy his paintings - friends such as Brian Epstein, the Beatles, Cilla Black and many others, and with whom he kept up a lively social calendar.
That calendar included Cornwall, where he became acquainted with many fellow artists - Terry FROST, Rose HILTON, Mary STORK, Jane AKEROYD, Maurice SUMRAY, many others - and especially after 1977 when he retired from selling antiques in the north and moved to Cornwall. He was always a gossip, and frequently irascible, but was an entertaining and sizzling companion to be with at a party and in later life, a prolific artist, keeping studios in Cornwall and Brighton, Sussex.
He lived near St Just for 20 years together with his gentle and tireless friend, Bill King, one of two long-term partners that he met late in life. He was a sometime member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, but resigned in disgust upon one or two occasions (probably with good reason!). He also remained a member of the Liverpool Academy of Arts.
William FEATHERSTON
Featherstone was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Forging a birth certificate to acquire quick ageing he joined the navy during WWII and served in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, returning home in 1946, a self-admitted uneducated boy of 19.
After acquiring enough qualification (a BA through night classes), he attended the Ontario College of Art and became a high school teacher. Meantime his primary interests became political, the peace movements and social justice. A socialist teacher friend he made during that time, one John Jones from Liverpool, convinced him to travel (1958) to Britain to teach, which he did, first in Ireland.
'... I followed up with a trip to England which lasted for 12 years. I had shown in Canada (two solo exhibitions with Jack Pollack in Toronto) but England was the real beginning of my art career. I settled in St. Ives, Cornwall and was soon immersed in a fabulous art community. I associated with artists working at that time: Francis BACON, Patrick HERON, Barbara HEPWORTH, poets and playwrights: W.S. Graham, John Antrobus…. among many others.
I began a sculpture career showing in St. Ives, Penzance and eventually London, Edinburgh and the continent. My work was fundamentally abstract but contained references to architecture and hints of configuration.' (excerpt from his biography at http://williamfeatherston.com/)
In 1971 he returned to Canada
A Romily FEDDEN
Born in Bristol, Fedden studied painting with Herkomer at Bushey and at Julians Atelier, Paris. He travelled and exhibited widely at Paris Salon, Venice International, North Africa, Munich and New York. He lived at Burford, Oxfordshire and then at Rye. East Sussex. During WWI he served in the armed forces.
In a prolific exhibiting career, he showed his work in all of the major galleries but especially the Walker Gallery, London where he displayed over 435 paintings of varied landscapes.
His association locally was with St Ives,and there are brief references to him by both Whybrow and Tovey in the early years, but no further local information to date.
Peregrine Mulvogue FEENEY
Birmingham-born, (29 November 1837 GRO), his father was a bookseller and stationer, and also, according to Tovey, a newspaper reporter in Birmingham. He was the brother-in-law (their wives were sisters) of the artist J W WATERHOUSE RA (1849-1917).
Benezit reports that he attended the Carey Academy, and also frequented the RA Schools. Between 1882-1912, Feeney exhibited and lived in a variety of locations, including addresses in London (1882, 1906), Devon (1892) and Norfolk (1909), and Bednar notes an 1883 title A Breezy Morning at Newlyn exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool which indicates earlier work in Newlyn.
The Liverpool exhibition in 1883 was the same show in which Walter LANGLEY, also from the circle of Birmingham painters who 'discovered' Newlyn as a painterly place, exhibited Pembroke Lodge, a painting of the house where he lived. Feeney exhibited A Sketch at Newlyn from a London address in Birmingham in 1885.
Feeney died aged 75 on 24 June 1913 at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk (GRO). He was described as 'Of independent means'. Tovey also notices that Feeney contributed significantly to the building-up of a 'decent' sized library at the St Ives Arts Club in 1899. All of this together indicates a long, even if sporadic, association with West Cornwall art and artists.
Maggie FEENY
Maggie Feeny is a newcomer to Cornwall, having lived in Sussex for 30 years. She is a contemporary landscape painter working in acrylics.
Christine FEILER
Daughter of Paul FEILER and his first wife June MILES, Christine is a ceramicist who was born in Bristol and studied at Bath Academy of Art and Cardiff Art College. She then trained as a teacher and moved to Oxford, where she taught ceramics. Since 1994 she has lived in Penzance. She exhibits widely and produces wonderfully coloured and designed pieces in styles akin to Art Deco, mainly in porcelain.
Christine exhibits locally and nationally, and in several contemporary galleries.
Helen FEILER
Daughter of Paul FEILER and June MILES, she is the founder of a gallery in Newlyn and a silversmith and textile artist.
Paul FEILER
Feiler was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1918, and came to England in 1933. From 1936-39 he attended the Slade before being sent to Canada for internment. This was relatively brief, and he returned to teach at Radley and Eastbourne College, and then at the West of England College of Art from 1946.
His first visit in Cornwall was to St Ives in 1949, and from that time associated himself with artist friends there, moving slowly from representational art to greater abstraction in his work.
From 1960-75 he was Head of Painting at the College, and instituted a system whereby art students would spend a two-week field trip amongst artists in St Ives, in order for them to begin to understand the realities of the life as a creative practitioner. In 1968 he received an Arts Council Award. His system of field trips for students continued until his retirement in 1975.
He was married first to the landscape painter June MILES, with whom he had one son (Anthony) and two daughters, Helen FEILER and Christine FEILER, (both of whom are artist craftworkers, one a silversmith and textile designer, and the other a ceramicist). His second marriage was to the abstract painter Catherine ARMITAGE, with whom he has twin sons. He works now in the Trewarveneth studio that once belonged to Stanhope FORBES in Newlyn. In a recent exhibition catalogue (2009) at the Paisnel Gallery, London the collater comments that Feiler 'has always been concerned with the architecture of space...sensitive compositions using light and tone and most importantly texture.'
His work is in numerous international and national collections in the UK, Austria, Canada, France, New Zealand, and the USA. A comprehensive list is included in his 2011 Catalogue for 'A Retrospective' 2-23 April at the Lemon Street Gallery, Truro.
