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Dr Panos S. Papadopoulos, Art Historian, William James Art Gallery, Athens 2005.

The cosmological period of philosophy attempted to theorize the perpetual change of things. For the first time the Ionians escaped from the mythical elements. They posed the question of what was the first principle that is kept constant throughout the temporal alternation and how it changes in individual things or how they revert to it. This first principle they sought in the empirically given materials. Such a matter for Thales was water.
He was led to this choice because of the agility, changeability and apparent inner vitality of water. While the solid is presented as dead per se, moved only by external causes, the fluid and the transient give the impression of autonomous mobility and vitality.
The work of F.J. Featham could be seen as painting water. The sluggishness of the water in the canals of Venice, the stagnant waters, the storm and the snow, the calmness of the water on a summer afternoon. The colours of the water reflected and literally dressing the buildings of Prague, the setting sun falling into the water. Even the built landscape is depicted at the time of rain. There is water everywhere. And all this in the unstable state of the sky and the variety of light changes.

F.J. Featham makes little use of human presence. It is something that would perhaps be less worthy of our attention. His painting is not anthropocentric. Man is for him only a passer-by who leaves behind only traces of his passing. It is no coincidence that the only human figure in the works that are exhibited is a man with an umbrella hurrying to protect himself from the rain.
For the artist, only the surface of the earth as well as the large surfaces of land, sky and especially water are indestructible and eternal elements whose nature justifies any attempt at more impressive depiction... But these are not just seascapes. Far from it. Water in his work has an ontological background. Everything stands on water. It is therefore the first principle. That's the deepest proximity of his work to Turner's. Since he was the first to let the images emerge as if through clouds of colour, the turbulence of the sea, or emerge through abundant light.

F.J.Featham is familiar with the great English tradition of watercolour... G.Basevy a friend of Turner's wrote that it is impossible to give any idea of the colours of Greece. He would first of all need to show the dazzling sun of these climates. Lord Byron did what poetry could do, but he too fell far short; art is very difficult to render the dark blue sky and the dark blue sea. In the end, Turner's friend thought that this should be the target of painting. After almost two centuries I wonder, is this depiction of blue not also the aim of F.J.Featham? After all, as we have already pointed out a moment ago, the artist is in dialogue with the tradition of his material.
From Constable he keeps the observation of the particular effects of the changes of light in nature and the attempt to depict them in a realistic way and through the variety of colour tones.

From the Romantic tradition he keeps the impressions he wanted by rendering the unimaginable variety of shades created by the delicate and gradual as well as the sudden and bold changes of light and atmospheric phenomena.