Lot Essay
Paul Feiler, born in Frankfurt-am-Main, was educated in England from the age of fifteen. Feiler attended the Slade before the war and, after a run of successful shows at the Redfern Gallery in the 1950s, he withdrew from the London gallery scene for a time. 'It was Cornwall that gave Paul Feiler the greatest satisfaction. The character of the Cornish coast connected closely with his earliest childhood experience of the Alps. The whiteness of glacier was replaced by the foam of the sea. There was the same sense of vertigo in valley or cliff, and the same elusive quality of strong light reflecting from snow or sea, a non-space that produce unconcious echoes ... The paintings of the early 1960s have a clear, concise use of abstract forms. The colours are those of the Cornish landscape ... the shapes circular and tombed like the boulders' (T. Cross, Painting the Warmth of the Sun: St Ives Artists 1939-1975, Penzance, 1984, pp.168-9).