Connecticut-born painter whose titles include Land's End. He died in Washington DC.
Letter from his son:
'My late father John Faulkner (1918-1993) was a member of the Penwith Society in the mid 1960's while my family lived in St. Day and Grampound. John taught art at the old Redruth School of Art and was friends with sculptor Denis MITCHELL.
John left quite a body of work which remains in a family collection. Our family emigrated to California in 1967 where my father taught art at the University of Santa Cruz and continued to paint. His work is also in collections throughout the world. For more info on John you can visit my website where I have a page dedicated to him.'
Born at Eggington near Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, the young Madeline grew up in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. She later lived in London and studied in Paris. In 1908 she became a student of Stanhope FORBES in Newlyn, and was subsequently based in Lamorna, studying under Samuel John Lamorna BIRCH. She was a popular member of the Lamorna community during the years 1912 to 1914. During her time in Cornwall she put together a scrapbook revealing her friendships, which is now in the possession of Penlee House Gallery & Museum.
In 1909 she exhibited a series of miniatures on ivory at NAG, and sold Pollie in 1909 and The Bargee’s Daughter there in 1910. In 1909 she had her first success at the Royal Academy with The Two Pigtails. Two years later she had two further works on display there.
In 2011 a miniature portrait by Madge Fawkes of Florence CARTER-WOOD (a friend and fellow student at the Forbes School) was discovered hidden behind an image of a boy, which had been in the possession of Gilbert Evans.
During the 1920s Madge was based in Chelsea, when in England. She continued occasionally to have works shown at the Royal Academy up until 1931. In 1939 she was awarded the Grenfell Medal by the RHS for her paintings of Lesotho wild flowers. She showed considerable skill in garden design.
Marion Whybrow wrote in 1987 about Fearnley in her Inspire 2 exhibition catalogue, that 'his subjects are various-towns, villages, churches, isolated farms, which appear unplanned yet integrated with their surroundings. He has a special liking for the curious - juxtapositions of the new and the obsolete in buildings and artefacts, the unpretentious and the eccentricities of people and their animals.'
Hilda Fearon was born in Banstead, Surrey, and was the younger sister of Norman GARSTIN, 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.
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.
Featherstone was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Forging a birth certificate as he was too young to enlist, 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.'
In 1971 he returned to Canada.
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. He also spent some time in Polperro, where in 1907 he and his friend Herbert Edward BUTLER established a school of painting. Later that year Fedden married an American writer, Katherine Waldo Douglas, with whom he subsequently moved to France.
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 moved to Cornwall after living in Sussex for 30 years. She is a contemporary landscape painter working in acrylics. She is based in Sancreed, west Penwith.
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.
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.
Daughter of Paul FEILER and June MILES, she is the founder of a gallery in Newlyn and a silversmith and textile artist.
For 20 years she painted regularly on the Kenyan island of Lamu, on the eastern coast of Africa.
The artist exhibited at the St Ives Open Day of 1923, and was a pupil of John Anthony PARK.
See LLOYD FERGUSON. The artist used his wife's maiden name - 'Lloyd' - in order to avoid confusion with the established artist known as William J Ferguson.
Born in Cheltenham, Glos, the artist used his wife's maiden name - 'Lloyd' - in order to avoid confusion with the established artist known as William J Ferguson (WCAA). He married his first wife, Irene Lloyd, daughter of brass founder, Thomas Lloyd of Worcester, in 1879. The couple had three children, making their home at Otley House, Bath Road, Cheltenham. In 1881, Ferguson exhibited in the 16th spring show of watercolours by the Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, with a painting entitled Newlyn, Cornwall.
His first wife died in 1893, and re-married in 1895, his second wife being Helen Louisa Tyler, the daughter of bank inspector George Tyler of Southhampton.
Ferguson died aged 88 in Southampton (GRO).
Mentioned in Whybrow's 1901-10 list of artists in and around St Ives.
George Ficklin was born in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, Hampshire. He is believed to have married his wife, Amelia, during the 1860s and the couple lived in Lewisham (1871) and in Surrey (1891). He was employed as an HM customs officer during the 1880s and 1890s.
Kelly's Directory of 1893 lists this artist as living at Penlee Villa, Penlee View Terrace, Penzance. Penlee House includes a painting of Ficklin's, entitled Contentment, dated 1895.
Wood identifies him as living in Pimlico, London at earlier dates (1865-1885), but also finds that he exhibited seven paintings of landscape subjects from Wiltshire, Devon and Cornwall at Smith Street within that period. This may simply indicate that he had also been in Cornwall from time to time in years prior to residence from the mid-1880s.
From 1885 he is also recorded (J&G) with an address in Falmouth. He exhibited at both the RBA and RI. Ficklin died in Penzance.
Gill Fickling divides her time between Cornwall and Andalucia. She has a BA in Film & Photographic Arts from Westminster University, and has participated in the Defining Practice course at Newlyn School of Art. Having spent most of her professional life as a human-rights, documentary film-maker, Gill now focusses full-time on her painting.
The son of a yeoman farmer, Harry Fidler was born at Teffont Magna, Tisbury in Wiltshire. He was the ninth of ten children of William Fidler (1807-1877) and his wife Jane nee Humby (1814-1882) who married at Dinton St Mary Church, Wiltshire, in 1839.
The artist's early years were spent in farming, an upbringing which had a marked influence on the subjects he would later paint. Three of his siblings - Fanny, Lucy and Gideon - also displayed artistic talents, yet Fidler was well into his thirties before attending Herkomer's School at Bushey in 1891 for a couple of years.
He returned to Bushey in 1898 where he met and married another student, Laura Clunas, settling initially in Salisbury (possibly studying further at the Salisbury Art College), with Harry leasing an old Methodist Chapel in Teffont Magna, Wiltshire as his studio. The Fidlers visited St Ives on a number of occasions, first being signed-in as guests in the St Ives Art Club in 1907.
They appear to have joined the Arts Club for a period, but eventually settled at Andover, which remained their permanent home. A figure, rustic and domestic painter, the artist used oil on canvas, with at least eight of his RA exhibits being six foot canvases. Unfortunately the canvases were of an often inferior type (burlap or potato sacking) with little or no ground, which has meant that many of his pictures have often needed restoration. His earlier work was signed with the monograms 'Fid' or 'Hfid'.
A recent correspondent, and family member writes (2012) 'I can confirm that there is a strong connection between Harry and St Ives - I once owned a painting called Waiting for Herring, St Ives and have seen numerous paintings of similar beach and fishing scenes.'
Jenny Field moved to Cornwall from Hampshire in 2015. She studied Drawing and Art History at Winchester School of Art, and attends regular life drawing classes at the St Ives School of Painting.
Her work has been shown in Cornwall, Hampshire and London.
Bob Fierek has been an established potter in the Tamar Valley for over two decades and works from a studio in Albaston near Gunnislake. He makes a wide range of functional and decorative stoneware. He is currently experimenting with white earthenware.
His wife, Rosie FIEREK, is also a potter.
Rosie Fierek and her husband Bob FIEREK work from a studio in Albaston near Gunnislake. Her designs are wide-ranging, including individually hung pictures of birds and landscapes, medals and commemorative ware, fireplace surrounds plaques, and motifs for her husband's thrown ware.
Rosie is also an experienced leader of workshops and community-based projects.
Derek Finch lives in Totnes, Devon where he works full-time as the Projects Manager of a housing association for the disabled. His first foundation course was in Art Therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art and Design (1987-8), followed by Visual Studies at Oxford Polytechnic. His degree was in Art and Social Context at Dartington College of Arts in 1993.
As an artist, he works with old, redundant antiquarian books and re-invents and recycles them, to create a new form: "giving them a new creative life. When I make an 'art book' or a 'Speaking Volume' (his commercial name for his work), I let all the aspects of that book influence me: the age, cover title, physical texture, sze and structure as well as the book's literary content, to create another layer of meaning. Each book is re-assembled, sculpted, painted and transformed to unfold a new story."
He visits Cornwall frequently both as a holiday visitor, a working artist and an exhibitor. He has exhibited in bookshops, galleries and museums primarily in the south west of Britain, but also in Switzerland, Germany and Oxford. In Cornwall this includes NAG (1998), Beside the Wave, Falmouth (1999), The Book Gallery, St Ives (1999), The Island Gallery, St Ives (2005) and the Penzance Arts Club (2006). In 2010 he exhibited his work at the Penzance Literary Festival at Trevelyan House, as organised by the HYPATIA TRUST.
Dana Finch works from Trewidden Garden Studios at Buryas Bridge, near Penzance. Her subjects include the landscape of Spain.
She lived in St Ives with her brother, Colonel James Marshall Findlay (d1945) and his wife, Cecile, stalwarts of Arts Club and community activities in the town.
Although she exhibited in a number of tours with STISA, by 1938 she had moved to Glasgow; she did, however, retain her membership of the Society.