Winifred Nicholson

Flowers bursting out of vases, check table cloths, bowls of strawberries and curtained window views. Winifred Nicholson's paintings all appear to be plucked from idyllic domestic interiors. Her colour palette complimets with touches of lemon yellow, rosey hues and soft pale blues. There is nothing dark about these paintings, nothing angular or harsh. 

Yet while they might belong to a powdery feminine landscape (Victorian ladies dabbling in charming still lives) Nicholson does something bold in her work. She reinvents the traditional floral scene, imbuing it with her own abstract style and acute sense of design. 

Studying for my Master's at the Courtauld I found that Winifred was, perhaps inevitably, overshadowed by her more radical husband Ben Nicholson - before he ran off with the St. Ives sculptor Barbara Hepworth. His fractured collages and stark modernist simplicity earnt him much applause and whimsical Winfred was often left behind. Despite this, it is her work that appeals to me and, now I'm working at Sotheby's, I've had the chance to inspect it up close and see just how vibrant it really is. 

Below I've had a go at recreating her painting style, taking inspiration from a work Sotheby's recently sold titled Alwoodii Pinks in a Glass Vase (1930) along with Penstemons (1927) and Helen's Flowers (1970s). I wrote about Penstemons (the middle one) in my thesis briefly - I think I was interested in the shadow...