About

EMILY FEAVER - ARTIST and PRINTMAKER

I have been working as an Artist and Printmaker for over twenty-five years.

Most of my work is observed directly from life, using oils and watercolour. My linocuts, once a sideline, now play a major role.

From grey-blue beginnings in London, my paintings have progressed via the lush, claustrophobic climes of a village near Farnham to the exposed, chalky light of a remote field in Hampshire.

I now live and work from a self-built studio within earshot of The Watercress Line, painting the snow as it collects on a fallen tree, the surrounding fields, trees and sky; the derelict out-buildings, and piles of wood and scrap metal.

The vagaries of the British weather often drive me indoors, where paintings dwell on chairs in empty rooms, discarded clothes, shoes, books and gardening gloves; inanimate objects charged with the presence of absent owners.

Still lives always predominate – I collect old china plates and cups and love the way the subtle, reflective, patterned surfaces of these energetic vessels interact with the beautiful, perishable lives of fish, fruit and wild flowers. In recent work, scraps of salvaged wallpaper, with birds, boats and fishermen have lent a whimsical dimension.

I fill my sketchbooks with people and places; Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, Northumberland, France, Italy and Greece. These reappear in my linocut prints, edited and composed like poems. Recent prints range from small birds and insects to cyclists and complex, large-scale repeat pattern images.

I was brought up in a household where paintings and art books took precedence over most things, by my parents, art critic William Feaver and poet Vicki Feaver. I attended life drawing classes from the age of fourteen and then went on to study the work of Rembrandt, Breughel, Titian and Velasquez at University. I soon realised that my passion for their work was painterly, not academic and began my own self taught practice as an artist. I have looked to the work of William Nicholson, Pierre Bonnard, Van Gogh, Stanley Spencer, Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, and Evelyn Dunbar (amongst many others) for inspiration.

August 2015