Dr. Panos S. Papadopoulos, Art Historian, June 2006.
Our country does not have a long tradition of watercolour. Few artists have worked exclusively in this visual genre. There are many reasons for this fact. Climatic conditions have played their part, the prevalence of oil painting has been another. The most important one is that in Greece, for historical reasons, the causes that gave birth to watercolour two centuries ago were absent. This genre was associated with the romantic tradition of the travellers. They were the ones who needed an easy way of pictorially capturing the monuments they encountered on their travels. Watercolour was that tool.
The art of watercolour is therefore linked to the art of wandering. This connection comes effortlessly to mind when we refer to the life and work of F.J. Featham. For it is the romantic echo of the journey and wanderings that led him from London to Crete. F.J.Featham knows the tradition of watercolour. The great artist is always in conversation with the history of his material and at the same time through his work he expands this tradition. He is the master of observation. Only through the exercise of the gaze can the nuances created by the delicate, gradual but also sudden and bold changes of light and weather phenomena be rendered. F.J.Featham converses with the great creators of the past. The freshness retained in his works - thematically but above all chromatically - is the element that the artist retains from Constable. The playfulness of colour and sometimes improvisation are elements that refer to Sargent. His works do not have man as their centre. A painting of water could be described as most of his subject matter. Large water surfaces within multiple tonalities of blue.
His watercolours, the entire work is figurative. For the artist believes that there is no need to resort to abstraction or schematization to ultimately lead to the interpretation of the landscape. F.J.Featham's images are not simply a representation of the natural world. They are interpretation. After all, as Morandi would subscribe, there is nothing more enigmatic than the real world itself. Kant used to say that beauty is that which is universally liked without concepts. This sentence comes to mind when looking at the work of F.J. Featham; for it is this effortless feeling of beauty that the viewer takes in and is the essence of his painting
