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Kate Nicholson (British, b. 1929)


Kate Nicholson, the daughter of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, was born in Bankshead, Cumbria, but is more closely associated with St Ives, which she visited with her parents as a child, and where she settled in 1956. She became a teacher, having studied art at Bath Academy between 1949 and 1954, but above all is known in her own right as an exceptionally talented and subtle painter. She joined the Penwith Society of Artists, renowned for its breakaway modernism, in which her father had played a key role, and despite her modest output was represented in the Arts Council tour ‘Six Young Painters’ in 1961, and has had solo shows at Waddington Galleries and the Marjorie Parr Gallery in London. Commercially available examples of her work are extremely scarce.

“Interaction”, painted in 1966, is an outstanding example of Nicholson’s sensitivity to form, colour and texture. It is an abstract work, yet derives its effects and its movements from forms observed in nature. A gorgeous, abstract-expressionist background is built up with a pale swathe of broad brushstrokes, textured by gentle vertical dashes of lilac, hovering over a scumbled maroon. Over this, interlaced scything lines create a series of rhythmically-related forms which dance across the board. “Interaction” achieves its effect of delicate balance through its unobtrusive structuring around axes that approximate the golden ratio, marked in relief by the divide in the card, and in paint by the switch from orange to red. The work is thus an enchanting combination of informal and formal, integrating both the impression of found material and the improvisatory character of the fluid lines within a geometric framework.

“Sea scape, Eigg”, is an important canvass, demonstrating Nicholson’s masterly paring-down and reconfiguring of landscape through nuances of colour and elemental techniques. Eigg is an island in the Inner Hebrides, which Nicholson, together with her mother and their close friend the poet Kathleen Raine, visited frequently. Several of Winifred Nicholson’s canvasses of Eigg are sweeping views from the island looking out to sea; here the same elements are latent. Rocks are suggested by the impasted brown in the foreground (or, more strictly, at the base of the canvas, since the perspective is flattened); sand by the thin, even spread of pale yellow; the sea is reduced to lines and discrete brushstrokes, that are nonetheless varied in their tones and techniques, the bolder, unmodulated diagonal stroke perhaps indicating a wave; and the sky and moving clouds adumbrated by delicate dabs and slanting dashes. These four principal bands of the canvas work together to create a model of balance and contrast, the animated sky corresponding with the flat plane of the sand, and the flat lines that evoke the sea meeting the land being echoed in relief in the lower, darker, gently curving suggestion of rocks and the land.

Comparisons are inevitably drawn between Kate Nicholson’s work and that of her parents. Here their influence might be detected in the back-to-nature aesthetic; more specifically, the confident lines and pared-down forms recall Ben Nicholson, the subjects and palettes Winifred, and the interest in textures, both. But these exquisite paintings also clearly demonstrate that Kate Nicholson coined a language that is all her own.

Both these works come from the collection of Kathleen Raine, whose poetry is so closely allied to the formal balance, organic vision, and delight in simplicity of Nicholson’s paintings.

Peter Maber

 

Kate Nicholson. Sea scape, Eigg

Sea scape, Eigg
oil on canvas, with painted backboard
signed and titled on reverse
40 x 49cm

Provenance: the collection of Kathleen Raine

SOLD 
(in artist's original wooden box frame)


Kate Nicholson. Interaction



Interaction
1966
oil on card
signed, titled and dated 1966 on reverse
32 x 34cm

Provenance: the collection of Kathleen Raine

SOLD 
(in artist's original wooden box frame)

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