SAY IT WITH FLOWERS | WINIFRED NICHOLSON

Winifred Nicholson, Flowers, St Ives c1968, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Castlegate House Gallery

‘My paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower’, wrote Winifred Nicholson, in her 1969 essay The Flower’s Response.

Nicholson was a colourist, who developed a very personal post-impressionist style. She loved painting flowers, more often than not incorporating a landscape beyond them, seen through a window.

‘Flowers mean different things to different people – to some they are trophies to decorate their dwellings (for this plastic flowers will do as well as real ones) – to some they are buttonholes for their conceit – to botanists they are species and tabulated categories – to bees of course they are honey – to me they are the secret of the cosmos.’

She continued the theme in her 1974 essay Three Kinds of Artist: ’Flowers create colours out of the light of the sun, refracted by the rainbow prism. So I paint flowers, but they are not botanical or photographic flowers. My paintings talk in colour and any of the shapes are there to express colour but not outline. The flowers are sparks of light, built of and thrown out into the air as rainbows are thrown in an arc.’

Flowers, St Ives, c1968 was probably painted while on a visit to the Cornish village she made that year to visit her daughter, Kate. ‘I had a small room with the sea breaking under my window near to the quay near Kate’s house’ she wrote, in a letter to her former husband, Ben Nicholson, Kate’s father. There’s another family connection on the verso side of the canvas: a painting of a ship on rough seas, accompanied by a tug, very much not in her style. It is thought to have been painted by her son Jake. 

The painting can be seen (and bought, price on application) at Castlegate House Gallery, in Cockermouth, Cumbria in their current show Heading into Winter, which also includes works by Carel Bennett, Norman Cornish, Jane Eardley and Keith Vaughan. Another Winifred Nicholson painting is also on display, painted much earlier, in 1930, entitled Cissy Noble and Kate, featuring her ‘helper’ holding her baby daughter.

castlegatehouse.co.uk