Into the Wide Blue Yonder. Source: Fairfax Gallery

Frances Featherstone’s indulgent and richly decorative paintings convey individuals caught in quiet moments of domestic bliss, gazing out of the window, lounging on the sofa, or (most commonly) curled up in bed under layer upon layer of plush, vividly patterned fabric. Looking down on these duvet dwellers from above, she captures them seemingly unaware, lost in their own thoughts and dreams. This viewpoint also allows her to revel in the contrasting decorative patterns of bedding, floors, and clothing spread out before us, and how they convey the warmth and familiarity that so many of us need in our own hermetic worlds.

Featherstone trained as an artist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, where she earned a first-class degree. She worked for several years a Senior Designer for the BBC, and this undoubtedly shaped the way she stages her artworks, which carefully integrate people with their surroundings in order to tell us a story.

The Best Seat in the House, 2021, Self Portrait

But her greatest influence by far, Featherstone says, was her mother, whose creative approach to interior design meant their home was always a space for individual expression, filled with patterned wallpapers and opulent fabrics. She says, “If we are formed by the experiences of childhood, I guess this is where my sense and love of colour and patterns first came from,” adding, “My sense of patterns and colours 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.”

Nights in White Satin. Source: Fairfax Gallery

While her figurative practice has encompassed a range of approaches, Featherstone is perhaps best-known for her ‘duvet’ paintings, documenting tiny people engulfed in enormous swathes of soft, fluffy, and richly patterned bedding, cradling cups of tea, stroking cats, sleeping, or gazing into dream-like book illustrations. These paintings convey the kind of intimate moments we wouldn’t normally share with the outside world, when we fully unwind from the frenetic stresses of daily life. She illustrates succinctly how vital fabric can be in building a protective, comforting cocoon around ourselves during these times, and how this can become the place we turn to over and over for comfort, escape, rest, and sleep.

Where figures gaze into open books, she says the imagery is closely tied with the rest of the image, observing, “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.”

The Queen of Wishful Thinking. Source: francesfeatherstone.co.uk

Featherstone is also fascinated by the way the structured qualities of pattern can contrast with the messy, organic nature of the human body, and the ensuing chaos it so often creates. She says, “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.” As a means of bringing the two closer together, she sometimes dresses her sitters in clothing or pyjamas that match with the surrounding bedding or interior.

When Life Hands You Lemons

Recently Featherstone has extended this fascination with fabric into the way she dresses herself, which brings her closer to the art she makes, as she explains, “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.”