KENDAL.- An exhibition exploring the creativity of Winifred Nicholson viewed through the paintings that she made in Cumbria, (or Cumberland as it was then), where she lived for large parts of her life. The display, curated by Winifred’s grandson Jovan Nicholson, will include about 45 paintings, many previously unseen from private collections, as well as some of her best loved paintings, and will draw on new research, including previously unseen archival material. The exhibition is divided broadly into three sections: Bankshead in the 1920s and 1930s, Boothby and the Lake District post war, and Bankshead again for the last two decades of her life.

‘At the moment there is an increasing recognition of Winifred Nicholson’s importance and also a growing interest in her work, both amongst the general public and artists. 'Winifred Nicholson in Cumberland' will also be the first museum exhibition to concentrate solely on the paintings she made in Cumbria, and will break fresh ground as many of the paintings have not been seen before. It is particularly appropriate that this exhibition will be held at Abbot Hall for there has long been an association between the gallery and Winifred Nicholson, for previously Abbot Hall held exhibitions of her work in 1969 and 1982’, Jovan Nicholson

In the early 1920s Winifred Nicholson moved to Bankshead, a house situated on Hadrian’s Wall, and although she moved around during that decade Bankshead was where she spent most of her time and where many of her paintings were made. Winifred was at the forefront of modern painting in Britain during this decade and made paintings such as Bankshead Flowers in an Alabaster Vase that explore her ideas about colour: ‘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.’ And yet she was equally at home painting rural life in Cumbria as in Black Cattle or the landscape around her house.

Early during the Second World War Winifred Nicholson moved to her parent’s house Boothby, not far from Bankshead, and this was to be her base for the next twenty years. Here she painted various views from the house as well as interiors, and the exhibition will discuss the varying ways she explored these scenes. For example, Boothby Hyacinths, looks to the north west, Cumberland Landscape with Flowers, looks due north, and Evening at Boothby looks to the north east.

While at Boothby Winifred Nicholson made many trips to the Lake District painting variously at Ullswater, Borrowdale, Cockley Moor, Skiddaw, and the Duddon Valley. She also painted at St. Bees Head looking towards the Isle of Man, the Solway, Walton Moss and the Eden Valley. Winifred Nicholson delighted in the stone circles of Cumbria and depicted both ‘Castlerigg’ and ‘Long Meg and Her Daughters’.

The last section of the exhibition covers the period during the 1960s and 1970s, when Winifred Nicholson returned to Bankshead and made paintings looking from her house towards the North Pennines, often during the winter. Winifred Nicholson had always explored and experimented with colour, and in the last few years of her life she began to make paintings inspired by the use of a prism. She wrote about her late pictures, ‘I found out what flowers know, how to divide the colours as prisms do, … and in so doing giving the luminosity and brilliance of pure colour’. The exhibition will include a number of these prismatic paintings, as she herself named them, as well as some works on paper that she made that verge on the abstract and have a rare visionary quality about them.