Paul Feiler (1918–2013), whose paintings are the subject of this first examination of the artist's life and work, was greatly influenced by the English countryside, notably the cliffs and inlets of the south-west Cornwall coast. Feiler's early writings gave his friend Peter Lanyon a sense of "calm and I mean a sense of pause... I am aware that one must endure the contrary in order to find such tranquility in the countryside. Feiler wanted to fulfill Cézanne's demand that "a picture should give us...an abyss in which the eye is lost," which was based on the idea that "you stand vertically and you stare horizontally." Through the effects of narrow bands of color, silver, and gold in a pattern of square and circle, which he changed and developed over more than forty years, he transitioned from painterly abstraction to an examination of the illusive essence of space. Michael Raeburn recounts how Feiler survived numerous traumatic early events to acquire the contemplative peace of his profoundly spiritual work on the basis of full access to the artist's archive of letters, catalogs, and photographs. This is a crucial resource for anyone interested in the history of modern British painting.