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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
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