The unregarded happy texture of life
Winifred Nicholson's gifts from the ever-flowing world
Hello friends,
This deceptively simple painting by Winifred Nicholson might just be the happiest painting I’ve ever seen.
That breezy, sunny sea light. The glossy shimmering of the rough grass, rendered with such vigour and confidence. The blurred curve of the sea horizon that draws the gaze out towards distant, sunlit mountains. The gate, left ajar, painted a gorgeous violet-blue, inviting us to step beyond, into that softer, open pale blue. The feeling of wind and light and expansion and air. It’s a joyous invitation, this painting, effervescent with delight. This is a gate you want to step through, no hesitation, even though the path appears to vanish as if dropping over a cliff.
The painting was made on a trip that Nicholson took with her friend, the poet Kathleen Raine, to the isle of Eigg on the West coast of Scotland. What makes it particularly startling in its sheer joyousness and vigour is that she was 86 years old when she painted it. By the time it was first exhibited the following year she was already dead.
I can only wish that I should be gifted with such an infectiously exuberant delight in this brief life as I approach my own end, as contemplate passing through that narrow gate into the great unknowable. What had this artist learned, in her long life, that she could, nearing the end of it, paint something so evidently flooded with delight?
Nicholson might reasonably have claimed she had good cause to feel sorry for herself. She had to raise her three children alone after her husband the painter Ben Nicholson left, shortly after the birth of their third child, to take up with the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who soon gave birth to triplets. Winifred upped sticks to Paris, children and all, to immerse herself in the artistic ferment there in the pre-war years, but had to return to England and ‘war work’ when hostilities broke out. Caring for her elderly father, still an active politician, also took up much of her time. But Winifred was made of sturdily cheerful stuff. She carried on painting, surrounded by parents, children, then grandchildren, maintaining a warm, collegiate friendship and correspondence with her ex-husband throughout.
After Winifred’s death, Kathleen Raine wrote that her friends’ paintings ‘were made in terms of the unregarded happy texture of life…’. and remarked on her lifelong fascination with:
‘…the place of feeling, of life, in the here and now, the place of fleeting light, of the unfolding and fading of a flower…For Winifred the eternal was not some static abstraction but a living essence of the present moment, in which she had the gift of living so fully. To that moment she brought the whole of herself to meet whatever epiphany was present before her eyes, as a gift, as it were from the ever-flowing world’.
Winifred’s real subject, then, was light and colour, not as they define specific objects, but as they move through the ‘ever-flowing world’.
Raine again:
‘She was concerned to understand the physics and indeed the metaphysics underlying the miraculous manifestation of the spectrum, and in her last work was attempting to represent not coloured surfaces – colour absorbed by physical objects – but to see the visible world in terms of light itself, freed from the solidity of objects. The world, she had come to understand, is made of light, and light moves into and out of visible things with the freedom of spirit itself – is a manifestation of spirit. Winifred’s painting from first to last express this conception of objects as made not of solid matter but of light itself.
The present moment…was for her always new, always enough in itself, always that place of total freedom into which her painting was born. The present was, for her, first and last, an unfailing source of wisdom and delight, bringing with it possibilities of new ways of painting, new ways of seeing and of being, in a world which holds the promise and fulfilment of inexhaustible life.’
Winifred herself also wrote that the subject of her paintings was more than appears at first glance:
‘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.’
In a letter to a young painter who came to live near her in Cumbria in the late 1970s she expressed her philosophy of appreciation, of presence, and of immersion to the point of dissolution:
‘I had no mantra nor any meditative process, just an appreciation of the ‘everything’, a love for it, if you like – loving a thing or a person overstepping the barriers, the limitations, recognising the vastness of the ‘everything’, and its life, its timelessness, its universal size, its ‘no before no after, only now’ – its consolidation of all its essentialness, and most of all its lack of small parcels inside which the self is bound up. The conscious self is so small, so limited – the unconscious universe is so huge, so unlimited.’
For her, painting was first healing, then Praise.
As I grapple with what it might mean to make paintings in a burning world, how to survive by cultivating small joys wherever they may be found, taking delight in the everyday, how to do the quiet work of building happiness and resilience in a frightening world of so many horrors, and what those long, patient hours in the studio might all be for, I find inspiration in Winifred Nicholson’s example.
Join the Life Raft Creative Co-Working Session
Come and join me in the studio while I make a start on my next painting. You are welcome our creative co-working session every Wednesday from 3 pm to 4.30 pm UK time. It’s very simple. We say hello, share what we’ll be working on, then leave our cameras on and work together in quiet companionship for an hour, then sign off with a quick check-in chat. That’s it! If you miss a session or can’t make it live, a recording is usually made available to paid subscribers (though not this week as I was away.) You can find them in the subscriber chat HERE.
until next week!
Sam
Thank you Sam for a wonderful reflection on Winifreds work. It’s good to be reminded of her fabulous work. It sits beautifully against your own with them both radiating light and joy. We certainly need some of this it in our lives right now.
Thank you..a lovely read..I live near the islands where the Gavin Maxwell story with Kathleen Raine and Winifred’s connections all took place. Winifred’s paintings are so evocative and her Cumbrian rag rugs are also a delight.