About Steven Heffer: Still Life Distilled

Steven Heffer at Eye Feast 2026: still life, distilled

Regent's Park Gallery  ·  1 June 2026

A single red onion sits at the centre of a board, weighed against a neutral ground. Look at it long enough and it stops being an onion and becomes something else — a question about how much you need to give the eye before form starts to do its own work. That question is the engine behind every painting Steven Heffer is showing at Eye Feast 2026.

About the artist

Steven Heffer is a contemporary British painter based in London and East Sussex. He trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, and his practice — landscapes, seascapes, and still lifes — sits in the productive ground between pure abstraction and recognisable representation. The art historian Edward Lucie-Smith has written extensively about Heffer's career, positioning him as a modern descendant of the British landscape tradition.

Where his landscape and seascape work pulls toward weather and atmosphere, his still lifes are the quieter twin. They take their cues from Ewan Uglow and Paul Cézanne — two painters who treated the everyday subject with patience and intellectual rigour, letting tonal weight, placement and edge do the heavy lifting.

The work in the show

Heffer is showing seven oil and acrylic studies for Eye Feast — a sustained sequence built around four subjects: a red onion, lemons, pears, and a single abstract distillation of the lot. Looked at side by side, they read like variations on a theme; looked at one at a time, each holds its own weight.

These are visually modest still lifes, but the modesty is the point — strip away the busyness and the painting starts to speak.

Red Onion (32 × 28 cm) opens the sequence: one onion, plainly placed, set against a neutral ground. Two Lemons and Single Pear on Table (both 32 × 27.5 cm) work the same controlled premise — a single object or pair against a flat field, where the work is in the small decisions about colour, edge, and how much air to leave around the fruit.

Pears on Small Table (31 × 40.5 cm) places two pears against a green ground; Still Life Pears and Lemon (41 × 31 cm) gathers three pears and three lemons against a deep blue, the field temperature pushing the fruit forward. Two Green Pears (18 × 24 cm) is the smallest in the group — a close-tonal study where green fruit and green-and-white ground sit only just apart, testing how form holds when colour stops doing the work of separating it.

The outlier, painted specifically for Eye Feast, is Eye Feast: Abstract Red and Orange (50 × 40 cm). It pushes the still-life premise further into pure colour and pattern — recognisable enough that you can find the food in it, abstract enough that the food is no longer the point.

A quieter table

What Heffer's grouping rewards is repeat looking. In a show called Eye Feast — a wall full of food and drink rendered with appetite, colour, theatre — his sequence is the slow movement. The fruit isn't there to be eaten; it's there to be measured, looked at carefully, and (in the abstract piece) eventually dissolved into the painting around it. Whether you respond more to the careful Uglow-leaning studies or to the Eye Feast abstract, the work invites time.

Where to see them

All seven works are in Eye Feast 2026 at Regent's Park Gallery, 17 Princess Road, London NW1 8JR, from 5 June to 27 June 2026. Prices range from £850 to £1,200. Each piece is oil or acrylic on board (one on canvas), framed, and signed by the artist. Available for collection from the gallery during the show, or via the online shop at regentsparkgallery.com.