Featured Artist
Felicity Mara is a London-born painter whose work has been exhibited widely since the mid-1980s. She studied Fine Art at Camberwell School of Art before relocating to Cornwall, where she works from her studio at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives.
Her paintings emerge from a deep engagement with the landscape, light, and atmosphere of her surroundings — not as literal depictions, but as visual responses to the sensations and rhythms of the natural world. Her work carries an abstract, lyrical quality shaped by the ever-changing coastal environment.
Mara’s recent large-scale paintings are influenced by the shifting intensity of sea light, weather patterns, and the distinctive character of her studio setting. Often described as visual poems, her canvases use mark-making as a form of notation, balancing movement and stillness, and holding a quiet tension between past and present.
My paintings are not literal depictions of the things around me, but I work with all these things in a sense – the landscape outside my window, the space inside my studio, the changing angles of sunlight and sounds that float up from the beach. As far as possible I am trying to find a visual equivalent for the experience of being here.
Felicity Mara was awarded a tenancy at Porthmeor Studios in 2012 and is now represented by CIRCLE Contemporary with her latest works showing at the London Art Fair 2026.
