Ravilious in Cambridge

Eric Ravilious, Geraniums and Carnations, 1938, Fry Art Gallery

Rather short notice, I'm afraid, but I'm giving a talk on the life and work of Eric Ravilious at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge on Thursday evening (that's 1 May I believe).

I'll be covering the artist's career as a watercolourist, also bringing in his book illustrations (wood engraving and lithography) and other aspects of his design work. The aim as ever is to make the evening enjoyable and informative.

Have just realised that Art and Life is still on at Kettle's Yard, featuring work by some of my favourite artists, especially Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. Slight quandary as I've promised to go and see the exhibition when it reaches Dulwich Picture Gallery later in May...

Winifred Nicholson, Summer, 1928, copyright The Trustees of Winifred Nicholson

OK, quandary solved, I'll just go twice.

Meanwhile, if you're in the Cambridge area and you want to see an impressive collection of Ravilious paintings, prints and ceramics, trot along to the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden - but make sure they're open before you go!

Winifred Nicholson: Music of Colour

Winifred Nicholson, Daffodils & Bluebells in a
Norman Window, 1950s (Kettle's Yard)

Walking around Kettle's Yard, the former Cambridge home of art collector HS (Jim) Ede, a few years ago I was struck by an expansive painting of a beach and the sea beyond. The picture was wide and soft and strangely luminous and, since there are no labels at Kettle's Yard (the house, I mean, not the gallery), rather mysterious. I found myself in the awkward and unusual position of having no-one to tell me whether or not I should take this picture seriously.

All I could do was look. The brushwork was loose and flowing, as if the artist had liked the scene very much and enjoyed painting it. In turn I found myself enjoying the muted colours and the lively brushwork. It seemed an original kind of vision. Then someone came by and said something about the artist being very good but not well known. I knew the name, Winifred Nicholson, through association with her husband Ben, but I didn't know her as an artist in her own right.

Winifred Nicholson, Sound of Rhum from Isle of Eigg, 1950s

This is hardly surprising, given the lack of opportunity to see her work. While there are stacks of weighty tomes devoted to Ben Nicholson (who left her for Barbara Hepworth in the 1930s), finding a book on Winifred was, until recently, quite a task. Now there is a colourful, spacious monograph by Christopher Andreae, although it's fairly pricey if you're not a fan already. There's also an excellent website, which has some gorgeous reproductions of her work. And, until December, you can see a small selection of her pictures on display at Kettle's Yard Gallery, complete with labels.

Current exhibition at Kettle's Yard Gallery

Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) enjoyed a long, varied and productive career. During the 1920s, a decade traditionally overlooked by historians of British art, she and Ben worked side by side, developing their own response to the modernist revolution and finding inspiration particularly in the landscape around their home at Banks Head in Cumberland. This became, in the words of Christopher Wood, 'a Painter's Place', where visitors included Paul and Margaret Nash, Ivon Hitchens and Wood himself.

Winifred Nicholson, Seascape (Sea and Sand), 1926 (Kettle's Yard)

He and Winifred became close friends, yet she tends to be sidelined when the story of Wood, Ben Nicholson and Alfred Wallis is told. The famous 1928 meeting in St Ives comes across as a rather masculine affair, but Winifred was staying there too (as was Wood's delightfully named lover, Frosca Munster). It is arguable that poor doomed Kit Wood was influenced as much by her as by Wallis, and when you look at Ben and Winifred's work from the late 1920s side by side you can see plenty of similarities.

Winifred Nicholson, From Bedroom Window, 1930

'She has probably no equal among modern British painters,' wrote a critic of her 1929 exhibition, 'as a colourist of the most exquisite refinement.'

Two years later she responded to her husband's departure by removing to Paris with their children, there continuing both to paint and to write about her ideas, before returning to Britain shortly before the war. For the rest of her life she would divide her time between her family and her painting, exhibiting regularly in London and enjoying periods of intense creativity and experimentation. Some of the work she painted later in life, especially in Scotland and around Banks Head, is as fresh and luminous as the pictures from the 1920s. Throughout, she maintained a warm, lively correspondence with her former husband and retained an endless fascination for the music of colour.

Winifred Nicholson, Flower Table, Pots, 1929

Thanks to Winifred Nicholson's estate for allowing me to show these pictures. Copyright of course remains with them. Do have a look at their website.

FFI
www.winifrednicholson.com
www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk

Crookwath

NOT Shaun the Sheep

We were in the Lake District last week, more specifically a valley just north of Ullswater, close to the village of Dockray. One day the sun blazed and we went canoeing on the lake - much quieter than the Thames, the only protests from a pair of geese guarding their island - the next a brisk north-easterly blew snow in our faces.

Actually it didn't feel much like the Lake District proper, there being so few other people around. Ambleside and Grasmere may be the preserve of robust families with rucksacks but the hills around Ullswater belong almost exclusively to the sheep. And what sheep! We were surrounded on all sides by Herdwicks, a breed with shaggy greyish wool and considerably more brain than your typical Shaun-the-Sheep type animal.

Ullswater

In their lack of concern for the weather Herdwicks are the sheep equivalent of Geordie girls on a night out. We were reliably informed that when it snows hard (ie measurable in feet) they cluster against a wall and let the snow pile up on top of them. Then they wait for it to melt, nibbling their own wool for sustenance, sometimes for weeks. With a clump of sheep thus buried it is not unknown for a second set to come along and seek shelter in the same place, so that the two groups are temporarily entombed in the snow one on top of the other.

It was lambing time when we were there, which can be rather grim in years when the ewes don't have enough milk. The sight of a ewe angrily butting a hungry lamb is not the most cheering, but we were fortunate to witness lambing in a very good year, with black, white and brown lambs leaping about all over the place.

The ubiquitous stone walls are apparently not very good at keeping Herdwicks in a field - they just climb over - but we saw how the sheep used them for shelter and warmth. The morning after the mini-blizzard, the pasture was covered in snow, except for a strip in the lee of a wall, where the morning sun had warmed the stone. While new lambs got to grips with the challenge of existence in this natural nursery, their mothers patrolled the vicinity for foxes and other predators. One ewe with twisted horns and a malevolent glint in her eye came charging towards me, stopping with said horns just short of my middle. Gored by a sheep? I suppose it's one way to get your name in the papers.

So the sheep are perfectly suited to their environment of rough grass, bad weather and stone which is attractive on a sunny day but otherwise an uncompromising dark grey. This stone was evidently the only building material for centuries, as every building is constructed from it. Thick walls and small windows reflect the climate, and there is nothing chocolate-boxish about the hard geometry of barn and cottage.

This combination of (mostly) treeless hills and austere buildings appealed to Ben Nicholson when, in the early 1920s, he was buzzing about with his wife Winifred, looking for inspiration in the landscape. I think it's quite telling that they charged all around Europe but ended up living on the very edge of what the Romans considered civilisation - up against Hadrian's Wall a few miles north-east of Ullswater.

I'd been looking at Ben Nicholson's paintings of Cumbria before we went, and when we arrived I recognised the simple barns and stripped-down landscape. Could there have been a better landscape for a budding abstract artist to explore? Like the Herdwicks, Nicholson fitted in.

What I didn't realise was that the Nicholsons knew the actual valley where we were staying, since collector and patron Helen Sutherland lived in a farmhouse just up the hill during World War Two and after. Winifred Nicholson painted at least one picture in the valley and, given Sutherland's largesse and fame, there were no doubt many other artists and poets who visited during the 1940s and 1950s.

It's funny how often one 'finds' a place, only to discover that generations of artists and poets have been there before, often leaving little trace. Paul Nash in Worth Matravers, Ravilious in Capel-y-ffin, Graham Sutherland on St David's Head... The same extraordinary, strangely authentic places appealed to neolithic mound-builders and Celtic monks, who no doubt found the same weather, and probably the same sheep.

We stayed at Crookwath Cottage, which is one of Alastair Sawday's Special Places.