Welwyn Garden City
Welwyn Garden City ( ) is a town in Hertfordshire, England, north of London. It was the second garden city in England (founded 1920) and one of the first new towns (designated 1948). It is unique in being both a garden city and a new town and ...
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
Chelsea School of Art
Chelsea College of Arts is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London based in London, United Kingdom, and is a leading British art and design institution with an international reputation.
It offers further and higher educat ...
where she gained a BA in graphic design. She then studied illustration at the
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It o ...
Felstead commenced her career by creating designs for
book cover
A book cover is any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book. Beyond the familiar distinction between hardcovers and paperbacks, there are further alternatives and additions, such as dust jackets, ring-binding, and older ...
s. Among the
author
An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states:
"''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...
s whose books she worked on were
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel ''Lord of the Flies'' (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980 ...
(including ''
Rites of Passage
A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual of the passage which occurs when an individual leaves one group to enter another. It involves a significant change of status in society. In cultural anthropology the term is the Anglicisation of ''rite ...
''),
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her ...
Isabel Allende
Isabel Angélica Allende Llona (; born in Lima, 2 August 1942) is a Chilean writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as ''The House of the Spirits'' (''La casa de los espír ...
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awa ...
. She has produced artwork for advertising campaigns, packaging, T-shirts,
opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...
,
ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
, television, magazines, greeting cards and books. Felstead's commercial clients have included
British Airways
British Airways (BA) is the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in London, England, near its main hub at Heathrow Airport.
The airline is the second largest UK-based carrier, based on fleet size and passengers ...
,
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a fourth television service ...
Barclays Bank
Barclays () is a British multinational universal bank, headquartered in London, England. Barclays operates as two divisions, Barclays UK and Barclays International, supported by a service company, Barclays Execution Services.
Barclays traces ...
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Radio Times'', and
The Body Shop
The Body Shop International Limited, trading as The Body Shop, is a British cosmetics, skin care and perfume company.
Founded in 1976 by Anita Roddick, the company currently has a range of 1,000 products sold in about 3,000 stores, divided ...
album
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records co ...
''
Sapphire
Sapphire is a precious gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum, consisting of aluminium oxide () with trace amounts of elements such as iron, titanium, chromium, vanadium, or magnesium. The name sapphire is derived via the Latin "sa ...
''.
Her artwork has been shown in many exhibitions in Britain and abroad. She was runner-up in the
Mother Goose
The figure of Mother Goose is the imaginary author of a collection of French fairy tales and later of English nursery rhymes. As a character, she appeared in a song, the first stanza of which often functions now as a nursery rhyme. This, howeve ...
Award for her illustrations in ''A Caribbean Dozen'' and has also received awards for book illustration in the United States.
Reviewers have praised the wide range of media and styles which Felstead uses in her work, as well as the way they "realize and complement" the texts. ''A Caribbean Dozen'', one reviewer said, "is made even more attractive by the wide-ranging artwork of Ms. Felstead. Her styles sweep from collages to pastels, watercolors to oils to inks. Some illustrations are bold and primitive, others impressionistic." ''The Circle of Days'', an adaptation of
Canticle of the Sun
The Canticle of the Sun, also known as Laudes Creaturarum (Praise of the Creatures) and ''Canticle of the Creatures'', is a religious song composed by Saint Francis of Assisi. It was written in an Umbrian dialect of Italian but has since been ...
, is made "outstanding y.. the immediacy of Ms. Lindbergh's verse and the beauty of Ms. Felstead's collage paintings, which combine childlike cut-paper images with earthy watercolour and gouache backgrounds. Just like the writing, what at first appears simple is actually quite complex." In ''Who Made Me?'', a reviewer found, "The art matches the text in its mood--it, too, is reverent but childlike. Mixed-media illustrations combining paints with delicate cut-paper work, they capture the awe-inspiring vastness of the African landscape as well as the intimacy and warmth of Zanele's relationship to her homeland and her seven friends." In ''Flamingo Dream'', another reviewer said, "The art is a wonderful collage mix: objects, torn paper, and childlike drawings colored in pencil or crayon, echo the honesty and realism in the text and are exactly what this little girl would have drawn or collected." One reviewer said about ''Earthshake - Poems from the Ground Up'', "Felstead’s energetic collages of maps, tiny photocopied figures, colored pencil, and paint marvelously evocate action and mood."
Cathie Felstead lives in Ashwell, Hertfordshire.
Bibliography
*1994 - ''A Caribbean Dozen: Poems from Caribbean Poets'', John Agard and Grace Nichols, editors; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*1998 - ''The Circle of Days'', Reeve Lindbergh, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*2000 - ''Who Made Me?'', Shirley Tullock, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*2000 - ''Big Wolf and Little Wolf'', Sharon Phillips Denslow, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*2002 - ''Flamingo Dream'', Donna J. Napoli, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*2003 - ''Earthshake - Poems from the Ground Up'', Lisa Westberg Peters, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*2006 - ''An Island Grows'', Lola M. Schaefer, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator
*2007 - ''Family Lullaby'', Jody Fickes Shapiro, author; Cathie Felstead, illustrator