Language Selection

Professor Antonis Kotidis, Department of Art History, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2021.

Can a painter produce an autobiography through his art?
The question applies to every artistic expression, from literature to architecture and from painting to theatre. The largest and best known section of "intra-linguistic" autobiography is occupied, inevitably, by literature since its medium is language. If an actor wanted to write his autobiography, would he or she choose the roles that moved him or her to such an extent that they marked him or her and present them as an integral part of his or her life, believing that the picture would be incomplete without it?
Fred Featham, an English painter who has been a naturalized Greek for decades, a Cretan and Rethymnian, does so in his own unique way with the new series of works he is showing at the Artillery Hall in the Fortress of Rethymnon: he emblematizes a subject as a part of his life, as revealingly as if he did it in words: the Rethymnon Fortress (the Castle) becomes the subject that reveals Featham in 2021, just as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji in Japan in 1831 reveal the importance of the famous mountain as part of Hokusai's autobiography, or as the numerous "portraits" of Mont Sainte Victoire show the role of this mountain in Cézanne's life in Provence later in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I call these, and many other similar thematic choices, examples of autobiographical art that, through the media of the artist, reduce the narrative elements of life to symbolic ones as they mark his journey as milestones. It would not have been difficult for the imposing castle built by the Venetians to fortify the town against Ottoman attacks to etch itself on the young English artist's mind as a symbol of an individual, his own, promise to keep his emotional, familial and friendly ties with the town and its people enduring and inviolable.
In these works he uses oil, in all its extensive range, with the same mastery as he wields, in earlier landscapes, watercolour. The use of oil as a material provides him with the facility to give the widest possible range of changes caused by light in colours and masses and to render all kinds of plastic impressions. Thus the Fortress in some compositions gives the sense of the solid and monumental with its heavy mass emphasized. In others it is faintly outlined on the horizon creating an impression of being almost weightless. At other times, with the oil-paint diluted, it leads our gaze to the unique clarity of the atmosphere and water interacting in phantasmagorical disintegration of the solid fortress.

In some compositions the Fortress is no more than a point on the horizon that persists; but there is another protagonist. In these images the dominant role of the sky, the majestic dome over the sea and the Fortress, is masterfully rendered. I would hazard the hypothesis that here too we have another aspect of the autobiographical element: the admiration Featham has for certain artists from the history of art. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there are references to Tiepolo, Rennie, Turner, and Constable in the rendering of the sky over the Fortress in some of the compositions in the show.

Even before the end of the last century and with increasing frequency in the early decades of the present one, the spirit of the subjective canon seems to have prevailed. Artists pay less and less attention to notions of collectivity such as the varied -isms established by modern art. In their place, the postmodern condition has established a free dialectical relationship between each individual and the past of art history. Moreover, the shift towards the individual life as a reservoir of experiences and memories is in line with the subjective spirit that runs through contemporary art and has legitimized the autobiographical dimension in the work of most contemporary artists. In these works of homage to the Fortress, Fred Featham confirms this with extraordinarily expressive results.