The Art of Winifred Nicholson
Artist who explored the quieter secrets of the cosmos
The artist Winifred Nicholson once wrote of Piet Mondrian’s work that it offered “more of truth than nature could ever oblige one to follow.” To her one-time husband, the artist Ben Nicholson, she wrote, “Yes, I’d like to get my work more abstract, but I seek the abstract of colour, which is to be found looking into the picture.”
One of Winifred Nicholson’s favourite compositional techniques was to combine domestic objects with a landscape, often placing flower arrangements on a windowsill or a shelf in front of a landscape setting. This methods resulted in a mingling of foreground and background, so that the near-at -hand and the far-away were treated as having an intimate relationship. Her paintings have two settings: her own domestic space and the wider space of the open world, as if one could give meaning to the other. Nicholson would go on to explore this device in all manner forms.
