Review: Feaver’s Lessons of Painterly Abstraction at YveYang

The Critic Engages with the Act of Painting

William Feaver - “Dead Vole” (2018)

It was the 1960s. Conceptual art and minimalism were the avant garde movements of the day. Donald Judd declared that “... painting is finished.” Yet, a group of figurative painters known as the School of London devoted themselves to the cause. Their numbers included giants such as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney. 

At the group exhibition titled, “Before the Mountain,” at YveYang, a close ally of and one of final sitters for Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud becomes seen as a painter - William Feaver. Feaver was formerly the chief art critic of the Observer and has authored definitive  monographs on the works of Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud.

William Feaver - “Far Spartylea” (2023)

Fever paints landscapes in an abstracted manner. What does painting mean for Feaver himself? What kind of works has he produced by maintaining a studio in northeast England? 

Feaver’s painterly abstraction takes on a verisimilar tone with naturalistic color choices and controlled, intentionally subdued light. And color suggests something about the visual language and framework on which the paintings are based: Feaver’s abstraction stays naturalistic or realistic, rooting the act of observation and painting within physical and material reality. Feaver seeks to mimetically represent observed reality through naturalism or “naturalistic abstraction” without penetrating into a psychological realm of abstraction.

William Feaver - “Raveningham Hall” (2002)

Abstraction would be incomplete without the consideration of form. The abstracted manner of Raveningham Hall (2002), is rendered no differently than Feaver’s depiction of trees and foliages: they both involve thick brushwork that expand sideways or move at rhythmic angles, and they both indicate the modeling of form through the use of light and shadow. 

The painting is no longer about illustrating the minute details and characteristics of the different materials and objects. Rather, Feaver strives to create a unified painterly language with thick brushwork serving as a building block akin to pointillism. The personality of the different objects, which was lost due to the denial of illustrational details, is recovered through the directionality of the strokes, which carry energy and character. 

Feaver’s works are of the moment, rooted in a singular time and location, despite the memory of previous observations and encounters. Furthermore, Feaver's work rejects the process of psychological interpretation in its abstraction but rather actualizes the sensation of material or physical reality and nature in an abstracted form of naturalism.

This distinction shows that Feaver sought to express tribute to the language of painterly abstraction in his unique style and voice without approaching the psychological realm of abstraction, which Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff pursued in the School of London, an eclectic movement of figurative artists based in the UK.

This direction or movement of painterly abstraction by Auerbach and Kossoff may have a number of formal affinities with the California Bay figurative art movement in the United States recalling artists such as David Park and Judith Linhares, as well as others working in the realm of figurative abstraction such as  Willem de Kooning, although Frank Auerbach disdained any association with Abstract Expressionism.