It became stimulatingly clearer as this book gradually took shape that Winifred Nicholson was a painter quite as fascinated by space as by light and colour—in fact that all three of these strands—the main driving forces of her art—are crucially entwined.

Her colour conveys light. The light in her paintings conveys space.

I knew Winifred made paintings in which the very near and the very distant almost appeared to touch. Wild flowers on a windowsill, for example, might be the immediate foreground through which the viewer catches glimpses of far away hills; children at a table wear party hats that might virtually coincide with the sea's horizon, and the distant liner that passes. What I hadn't fully appreciated was—as she once explained in a letter to Kate Nicholson her painter-daughter—that her sense of the sky in painting was not merely a backdrop beyond the horizon, but actually filled the "gulf" (to use her word) between near and far. This is what in conventional landscape painting was known as the "middle distance." In many of her paintings her brush, and the viewer's eye, seem to leap, like one of her favourite rainbows, over this middle area as if it is hardly there. But it is there—a kind of intangible emptiness filled with dynamic atmosphere. It is here, in the "gulf," that Winifred most potently placed the unreachable sky in her paintings. Here that she remembered and explored, with a sense of wonder, what most of us so easily overlook or disregard: that the earth is in the sky. Winifred Nicholson's paintings are quite literally "up in the air."


© Christopher Andreae