June Felter

Kathan Brown, Owner of Crown Point Press, San Francisco, September 2019

“In the 1950s, June Felter entered the fine art world as we know it in the San Francisco Bay Area, Both it and she were young. At the time she was doing mostly watercolors from life, and she employed detail along with gesture to capture her subjects with joyful appreciation. A critic wrote of her art-making as "possessive." In her art, he said, Felter seems to be saying ‘I have so intimately touched this line, this shape, this image, that it belongs to me.’”

Whitney Chadwick, Art Historian, April 2007

“Like her antecedents, the San Francisco Bay Area Figurative painters, many of whom would remain friends and colleagues, her paintings infuse the immediate and everyday with a sense of solidity and permanence. Their distant vistas and open spaces, laid down in broad sweeps of saturated color defined by visible brushwork, reach toward the grandeur often associated with the western landscape without either romanticizing or mythologizing it…

Painting, for June Felter, remains an act grounded in skill and accident, a process that is both familiar and mysterious, intimate and formal. The result is paintings that are deeply felt and endlessly suggestive, paintings that fuse the clarity of direct observation with the suggestiveness of memory and loss.”

Harry Roche, Artweek Review, October 1999

“As the boob-tube continues to babysit the American People, at least Felter’s playful satirical portraits momentarily deflate some of the hot air emanating from a few windbags while humorously capturing the sheer ludicrousness of it all.”

Stacy Moss, Curator, Wiegand Gallery, Belmont, CA, 1992

“In Girl Reading we enter a calm, cool, blue and green world lightly accented with red. The girl's eyes gaze downward, characteristic of Felter's figures, emphasizing her inwardness and autonomy from the viewer. Felter heightens the intensity in Steve Reading, with its charged complements of fiery orange-red and a whitened apple green. Here her gestural brushwork threatens to dissolve the chair, table, and vase. Steve is enmeshed in this world: His red pants merge with his red chair, as does his whitened green shirt with the adjacent table. Steve's downcast eyes again suggest complete self-absorption, here heightened by the glowing red reflected light that bathes his face. This painting does not merely recite the lessons of Bay Area Figurative art; it stands up to the best of them.”

James Monte, Artforum Magazine, December 1963

“[Felter’s] approach to subject matter is direct and free from bombast… [her] major artillery is her drawing skill which is well suited to watercolor painting and printmaking.”