Antonis Kotidis, Professor of Art History at the Department of History and Archaeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2013.
In his native England, the country with most brilliant tradition of watercolour in Western art, Fred Featham studied and taught painting before the wings of love led him to Rethymno, Crete. There he married, had children, became a naturalized Greek, settled and has been painting for close to forty years now.
His art medium is watercolour, which in the hands of a true craftsman like himself is an unsurpassed material to convey luminosity, poetic atmosphere, lyricism. It has another characteristic of his technique: it does not accept correction, error means destruction and a new beginning.
Featham has mastered his technique as few others have, and this is evident in the works he is showing from Saturday 13 April (until 11 May) at the Romanos 7 Gallery in Thessaloniki. His subject matter interprets nature, highlighting his particularly close connection with it. I choose "interprets" to describe what he paints because he does not copy but with many and varied findings he manages to convey to the viewer the vibration of his original stimulus with his own personal narrative. How does he achieve this? Below are three illustrative examples of the many more that one can discover for oneself in front of the works themselves.
One way is the transcription of the visual stimulus into a tactile one (fig. 1) : instead of placing on the paper three fields of the composition, the sky, the horizon and the sea (or the land) with a naturalistic rendering of the motifs, he simplifies them by reducing them to equal zones separated by colour and joined by light. You don't see the vegetation, the wave, the clouds. But you "touch" their texture, watching the porous material that absorbs the light, the small gaps left by the brush on its surface, which are hallmarks of painting, you perceive their aesthetics as a reference to the Japanese conception of painted texture.
Another way is the changes-modifications of the scale (fig. 2). In the subjects, for example, from Thessaloniki, you could hardly imagine photographs like this with the White Tower or the Galerius Arch. He puts before them the spaciousness he imagines they should have, with a car of other times in the former (though he painted the composition from life a few months ago) and with the buildings drawn at a greater than actual distance in the case of the Arch.
A third way is to overwhelm the composition with an element to a degree of excess (fig. 3) : as a firework dazzles us and for a moment everything is transformed into light, like the transgression of love when everything is new, so he stands in front of the sea and paints water in its cosmogonic singularity, so he marks the sky with the cumulus clouds in their own poetic whirlpool.
