Interview with Frances Featherstone, Artist

For as long as I can remember, I have always been fascinated by interiors and how personal they are, each room or nook telling a story about how time is spent there. Growing up, my grandparents kitchen was an important hub for all generations. We would gather around the formica kitchen table, sitting in green or yellow chairs and share stories of the day. My grandmother picked crabmeat every summer and we would sit and talk with her while she cracked shells open with beach rocks, her silver bracelets jingling with each whack. Summer people would come by to pick up their crabmeat and visit with my grandmother. David Cooper, the mailman would walk the mail right to her every day and sit for a spell and catch us up on goings on around the island.

The intimacy of an interior space has become an important part of my life – and my job. Designing rugs and home products is always with an idea in mind – what is the emotional goal of this space? Vibrant and festive? Meditative and peaceful? I love this challenge and think of it always when in new spaces.

Discovering the work of painter Frances Featherstone struck a chord with me. Her most recent body of work “From the Perspective of Angels” contemplates figures in spaces they inhabit and how the intimacy of the space and the figures are woven together. I am thrilled – and full of gratitude for Frances’s time sharing her stories and work with us. Here we go!

AA: Hello Frances! Congratulations on your work, many awards and accolades. Discovering your recent body of work was like running into an old friend you had not yet met yet. I connected to it immediately. Interiors, the people that inhabit them and pattern! How did you conceive of the concept for this work?

FF: We’re all very familiar with our bedrooms. The job of an artist is to help people see things from new perspectives. The concept of this series emerged from the idea of trying out new perspectives. I eventually landed on the perspective from above as being one that very few of us pause to consider. As soon as I painted my first painting in the series, it was evident to me that new and interesting patterns and ways of seeing emerge.

AA: The patterns in these paintings are such a rich element. What is the relationship of the patterns to the figures?

FF: We humans are animals and so we don’t think of ourselves as geometrically structured in the way that mathematical patterns are. In these paintings, among the unstructured landscape of the duvet and the bed and the figure, there is often a sense that order is brought to the scene by the patterns on the tiles and the duvet covers. In our interior spaces, we are often seeking this balance between geometrical order and fluidity. This balance between order and wildness in our life is something that the paintings explore. The figures sometimes even wear pajamas that match the geometrical patterns of the tiles and the duvet, as if seeking to become part of the wider order of the interior space.

AA: The figures are often reading – it looks like adventure stories in some, art in others. Are they dreaming? Studying? Planning?

FF: Of course, many viewers will probably see what they themselves desire in the paintings. If the viewer sees adventure or dreams of far off lands, maybe there is something within them that is resonating with the figure and the image in the book. As a painter, the books for me are also part of the composition and narrative of the piece. I choose the image of the book very carefully to suit the wider theme of the painting. So, for example, in a painting which is about fabrics and opulence, the figure might be looking at beautiful dresses. In a painting which is largely about colour and light, the figure may be looking at a far of sunset.

AA: Please tell us about the beautiful white cat. He seems to be looking right at the Angels. Do cats speak to Angels?

FF: That’s a really beautiful question. Cats appear in my paintings because they gravitate towards comfort and one of the most comfortable parts of the home is, of course, the bed. Also, cats have a very different perspective on our homes. They occupy the negative spaces, the spaces that we don’t often even perceive, such as the spaces underneath tables and chairs, or on windowsills or the backs of armchairs. They notice things that we might not. So the perspective of the Angels could, you are right, be the perspective of the cat. Alternatively, when the cat is looking straight at the viewer, maybe it could be said that the cat is breaching the fourth wall and looking out of the painting at the viewer of the painting. In that sense, cats could be said to speak to the viewer. Which, in these paintings, as the title of the series indicates, is the Angels.

AA: I’m very curious about your own personal living space. How do you live with pattern and color?

FF: My sense of patterns and colors probably comes from my mother. Growing up, she was fixated with these aspects of the home. In the first house I can remember living in, she painted every room a different colour, giving it a different warmth and feel. In the second house we lived in, she decorated the house with William Morris wallpaper and curtains. In her current home, which is a Vicarage in the Peak District, she has gone for a luxurious field with opulent fabrics, rugs, paintings and wall colors. If we are formed by the experiences of childhood, I guess this is where my sense and love of color and patterns first came from.

AA: How do you set yourself up for a day of painting? Do you have a routine to get you in the right space for this work?

FF: I need time to clear my head before painting, so I always take a brisk dog walk on the Ashdown Forest. This gives me a vast empty landscape in which to think about my mood and objectives for the day. When I sit down to paint, the process of creating the painting is meticulous and time-consuming. I feel it’s important for my brain to be working alongside my hands throughout; to be provoked with ideas to add to the creative mix. To do that, I listen to audiobooks of classic literature, and sometimes, maybe, the narratives and stories from those books might permeate what I’m painting. Or provoke ideas for new paintings.

AA: Please describe your favorite part of your home space and why it is special to you.

FF: The favorite part of my home space are the doorways. I have been fascinated by these portals between spaces. A number of my paintings from before this current series explored doorways, I see doorways as dramatic places of change. One of these paintings was of our front porch capturing over a period of time the changing people and objects that passed through the doorway in and out of our home. Children’s footsteps, parcels, animals, milk bottles were painted over each other to show the transience of doorways as places we don’t stay in but move through.

AA: How do you use color in your personal life? Has that changed over the years?

FF: I feel like the biggest impact my observations on color in my paintings have had in my personal life is probably in my choice of clothes. In a number of recent gallery openings and exhibition openings, it was fun for me to match my clothing to the painting of mine that they had selected for that show. With my painting, ‘When Life Hands You Lemons’, I wore a lemon T-shirt. With my two paintings comprised of blue and white stripes I wore a blue and white stripe shirt. In that way, the patterns and fabrics of the painting came out of the paintings and were also then present in my real life.

AA: Do you have a favorite painting or work of art?

FF: A painting that had a big impact on me during my university days was Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog painted in 1818. The painting shows a figure standing on a peak alone and turned away from the viewer. It’s interesting to me that a number of features of that painting probably still resonate in my work today. While my work is of interior spaces, the faces of the figures are not fully visible. They are turned away from the viewer, Enjoying their own version of glorious solitude. The painting was also evocative of a particular movement, called German romanticism. The movement includes great figures like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig van Beethoven, among others. A lot of the ideas of that movement have been important inspiration for me in my work and career.

AA: What’s next?

FF: This is going to be an incredibly busy year for me. I am currently in the middle of producing work for my first solo show which will be at the Fairfax gallery in Tunbridge wells in May. After that, it’s incredibly exciting for me that my work will be shown at a number of shows in America, including at the Los Angeles Art Fair in February and in December with Arcadia gallery in New York. Maybe most exciting is for me to have some time to reflect and think about new directions in which to take my work. I hope to have that opportunity because I won an art residency at the Wells Art Contemporary exhibition last year. I will be taking the residency in June. It will be with Nicky Ginsburg in the south of France for three weeks. And what comes for me after then, well, who knows.

AA: Thanks so much for all of this, Frances. It will be interesting to watch how your work evolves and how these themes ebb and flow. Congratulations and thank you for sharing.

Follow Frances on Instagram and see more of her work online at her website.