Winifred Nicholson: Music of Colour

manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognise if we are not to be swamped by all that is so rapidly opening up before us.”

For Jim, Kettle’s Yard was a way of life in the same way painting was for Winifred. The poet Kathleen Raine wrote: “Winifred’s painting grew out of her life with complete naturalness and simplicity. The day’s painting was a kind of fragrance breathed by that day and no other, its imaginative essence, its heart.

Each painting has its special mood and atmosphere, some joyous and full of light, some thoughtful and autumnal, others wild and lonely as winter; but all are alike in saying, like a character in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’, ‘Time stand still now! Because each day’s here and now is so fully present, it lives on.’” (‘The Unregarded Happy Texture of Life’, 1984) The play of natural light is one of the first things you notice at Kettle’s Yard.

Jim arranged rooms according to the way the light came in, through windows or skylights, positioning mirrors where they could reflect light effects around a space. Various glass objects, lenses and polished or reflective surfaces around the house alter the quality and direction of light as it hits them. I was once told a story about some friends who had been invited for dinner with Jim and Helen at Kettle’s Yard. When they arrived on the designated evening, the house was dark and it seemed as if no-one was home. The dinner guests thought perhaps they’d got the wrong date. As they were about to leave, Jim opened the door and exclaimed “Come in! Come in! We don’t turn the lights on because the light is so exquisite at this time of day!” I am reminded of Winifred’s many paintings that depict light coming in through a window. Her description of a pot of primulas on a windowsill captures the intensity and delight with which she painted this view: “the tissue paper held the secret of the universe…sunlight on leaves, and sunlight shining transparent through lens and through the mystery of tissue paper.” Winifred travelled extensively to paint, fascinated by the myriad qualities of light in places from Greece to Scotland, where she wrote “the beams fall slantwise, and shine through things instead of directly onto them as in India and Italy.” She painted flowers because she said they “create colours out of the light of the sun.” In her home, she built windows and also used mirrors to bring light into and around the interior spaces. Later in life, she used prisms to unlock the spectrum of perceived colour.

Jim created Kettle’s Yard as “a refuge of peace and order…where an informality 10| 11