Creative roots run deep in Frances Featherstone’s family tree and her artistic heritage is in full bloom in the British painter’s latest body of work.
Featherstone’s grandfather was an architect active during the height of modernism, so she developed an appreciation for interiors, exteriors and design from an early age. Her parents, also artists, met in art school. Her mother became a silversmith and noted jewelry designer. She was also passionate about interior design, and was inclined toward bold, clashing colors and patterns. Her father was a furniture designer. “I grew up with an awareness of buildings as works of creative expression, of interior spaces and furniture as choices for how to create the mood and feel of our everyday lives,” she says.
A Patchwork of Hopes and Dreams, oil on linen, 31½ x 23½ in.
In an interview with Angela Adams, an interior design company, Featherstone elaborated on her mother's aesthetic taste. “In the first house I can remember living in, she painted every room a different color, 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…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.”
Featherstone’s father and architect grandfather were also hobby oil painters and she received her own set of oils when she was 7. Although she always wanted to be an artist and earned an art degree with high honors, upon graduating her resolve to pursue becoming a professional artist waivered. “I thought I couldn’t pursue it as a career,” she explains. “I saw few role models I felt I could emulate, and painting had fallen out of fashion.”
Featherstone decided on a more “practical” career choice, albeit still creative, and went for a master’s degree in interactive media. It led to a job with the BBC, where she worked for decades as a senior designer, an experience she says influenced her way of seeing, honed her eye for composition and design, and helped her understand what drew in, held and moved the eyes of others.
Field of Dreams, oil on linen, 25½ x 19½ in.
After she had children. Featherstone picked up her brushes and started painting again. Portraits at first. While the figure is still central in her current series, they lack the specificity of portraiture. “When I am painting a specific person I get concerned with achieving precise likeness and less about exploring the universality of the human condition,” she explains. “The figure for me has now become a vehicle for the imagination. Mine and the viewer’s. It is a vehicle to release thoughts, dreams and stories.”
In her latest paintings, the faces of her subjects are obscured, either because they are painted from above or because they are turned into rumpled bedding that, when patterned to match the woman’s sleepwear, they almost disappear into.
“I adopted the aerial perspective…so people see themselves or other people in my paintings,” Featherstone explains. “For example, in my painting Fallen Angel the figure merges in the white linen…and we are left to interpret the story.
Coming out of my Shell, oil on linen, 29½ x 23½ in.
“Changing the perspective is also a way of making the ordinary look extraordinary. It is a viewpoint we are not familiar with. It compresses space and makes it seem abstract. It is a way of zooming in and feeling intimate with the scene. Or a way of zooming out like a cartographer might, to give the view used in maps,” she continues. “I think people might have that feeling when looking at my paintings.” This is why she named these paintings From the Perspective of the Angels, a series that will be unveiled in the artist’s American debut at Arcadia Contemporary from December 11 through January 10.
For Featherstone, narrative emerges as the painting develops. For example, as the piece Right Here Waiting,a fuscia-infused delight of pattern and texture, neared completion, she realized the composition was drawing her eye to the empty chair, rather than the tiles, book or the figure. “These aspects are not always intentional,” she says. “I think my most successful paintings are ones that have allowed the narrative to evolve and be open to interpretation.”
Right Here Waiting, oil on linen, 35½ x 31½ in.
Influenced by the philosophies of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche, Featherstone’s paintings explore key concerns of the German Romanticists: the subconscious, dreams, isolation and solitude, and ask many of the universal existential questions that have preoccupied artists and philosophers in perpetuity. What does it mean to be human? To exist? She points to Field of Dreams, which shows a woman’s outstretched arms amid a sea of poppies. “I seek to allow the viewer to transport themselves into the painting and into their own memories,” she says. “So while identity is key to the painting, and we are up close to the figure, we cannot see their features. This allows a deeper connection to the figure as we can imagine her, and ourselves, lying in the grass lost in contemplation, silent reflection and introspection.”
Fallen Angel, oil on linen, 39½ x 29½ in.
For Featherstone, the presence of poppies, evocative of the Greek myth of Demeter, who created the flower to ease her grief after Hades abducted her daughter Persephone, as well as the dreamy scene in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, enhances the sense of tranquility that pervades the piece. “We still use poppies as emblems on tombstones to symbolize the eternal sleep that awaits us all…so there is a pathos and melancholy in the sense that the figure in this painting will be laying in this field of dreams forever.”
In Field of Dreams,Featherstone is also trying new avenues to explore the recurring themes in her work by taking her scenes outside of the home and into a natural landscape. Still, most of her new paintings are interiors, often set in the coziness of the bedroom. A quote by Irish novelist Cecelia Ahern—“Home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling”—resonates with the artist. “In my paintings, I am trying to convey that feeling we all have of being in our personal space,” she says. “I believe that when we see interiors they speak to some deep primal part of us that always longs for home. This yearning that as humans we all share, and that connects us no matter whether the interiors are of a palatial bedroom in the desert or a fur-covered ice cave in the Arctic circle. Interiors emanate this sense of feeling safe. Somewhere we don’t need to pretend, but where we can be ourselves. Interiors are places where we can venture into our own interior.”
Master of Stillness, oil on linen, 39 x 35½ in.
Featherstone also visually plays with themes of chaos and order—and how they can coexist and complement one another side by side. We see this especially in works like Master of Stillness, where the geometric patterns in the tiles and fabric (a combination of African and Persian designs) are juxtaposed with the tussled sheets and haphazard pillows. “The painting explores the balance between order and what is organic which can be a metaphor for our interior and also out exterior world,” she adds.
Painting the Town Blue, oil on linen, 35½ x 31½ in.
In A Patchwork of Hopes And Dreams, a woman is stretching awake under a pile of quilts, which contain stories in every stitch, of the woman or women who made them, their culture, and often the past. I myself have a quilt created by a circle of my great grandmother and her sisters in the early 1960s. It was made out of their worn dresses from the 40s, the designs in the fabric so clearly from a different time. Featherstone also enjoys painting stripes, as in Coming out of my Shell. Like quilts, “there are so many different ways of interpreting them,” she says. “Stripes, depending on their color, can signify danger, mischief, or simply being true to oneself.
When pressed about what theme is the main driver of her work, what lies at its core, she lands on solitude. “I see solitude as a gift,” says Featherstone, adding that it is a part of her life and also very important to her practice.
Sunny Side Up, oil on linen, 47 x 33½ in.
“I find painting as a meditation into my own thoughts. It is important to me that I am being true to my own vision of what I want to be and where I want to go. Being alone for such long stretches of time teaches me how strong I am. How much I can achieve by myself. How I should have confidence in my thoughts and ideas and not worry about trying to be interesting, or what others want me to be. I think it is this sense that my work is true to my sense of self that resonates with my viewers. I think there are some thoughts that can only be thought, some places in our minds only discovered, if we are comfortable being alone.” —
Frances Featherstone: From the Perspective of the Angels
December 11, 2025-January 10, 2026
Arcadia Contemporary
421 W. Broadway, New York, NY 10012
(646) 861-3941, www.arcadiacontemporary.com
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