Freedom Of Colour

Jovan Nicholson Explores the Powerful Use of Colour in the Paintings of His Late Grandmother, the Great Winifred Nicholson.

- Jovan Nicholson

Throughout her long career of over 60 years, Winifred Nicholson was primarily interested in colour. Generally she chose to paint flowers because, as she explained, “Flowers create colour 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.” What is striking is how much she tested and developed her theories about colour, leading to a late flourishing in the last four years of her life.

After her marriage to the painter Ben Nicholson, they bought a house near Lugano in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland. Here they spent the first three winters of their married life, and free from the constraints of the London art world, they experimented furiously. On their way to and from Lugano they spent time in Paris where they saw works by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso – one particular painting by Picasso she described as having “a bright emerald green as swift as a viper”. They also knew Derain’s Table by the Window (1912, now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow), which depicts a cubistic still life with a landscape behind through an open window.

In their last winter in Lugano, Winifred Nicholson made her breakthrough, painting flowers on a windowsill with a landscape beyond, an idea that she explored in endless variations throughout the rest of her life.

STRUCTURING BRIGHTNESS