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Lot Essay
In 1969, Winifred Nicholson wrote, 'I like painting flowers - I have tried to paint many things in many different ways, but my paint brush always gives a tremor of pleasure when I let it paint a flower - and I think I know why this is so.
Flowers mean different things to different people - to some they are trophies to decorate their dwellings (for this plastic flowers will do as well as real ones) - to some they are buttonholes for their conceit - to botanists they are species and tabulated categories - to bees of course they are honey - to me they are the secret of the cosmos ... for resolving the ultimate of the universe is not all they can tell - listen, they will show how to turn light into rainbows ... What would we do for Rose without roses? for violet, cyclamen, for primrose, without their flowers? Flower hues change and glow and fade and are gone like dead leaves, gone but everlasting like the blossoms that Persephone gathered in spite of Pluto, black king of the underworld.
High, low, far away, near at hand - what more fundamental opposites can be found - 'Tis my faith that every flower enjoy the air it breathes' - of course it does, for what greater enjoyment than to turn common air into perfume, light into rainbows and the irreconcilable opposites into the neighbourliness of brush strokes' (see A. Nicholson [ed.] Unknown Colour, Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson, London, 1987, pp. 216-217).
Flowers mean different things to different people - to some they are trophies to decorate their dwellings (for this plastic flowers will do as well as real ones) - to some they are buttonholes for their conceit - to botanists they are species and tabulated categories - to bees of course they are honey - to me they are the secret of the cosmos ... for resolving the ultimate of the universe is not all they can tell - listen, they will show how to turn light into rainbows ... What would we do for Rose without roses? for violet, cyclamen, for primrose, without their flowers? Flower hues change and glow and fade and are gone like dead leaves, gone but everlasting like the blossoms that Persephone gathered in spite of Pluto, black king of the underworld.
High, low, far away, near at hand - what more fundamental opposites can be found - 'Tis my faith that every flower enjoy the air it breathes' - of course it does, for what greater enjoyment than to turn common air into perfume, light into rainbows and the irreconcilable opposites into the neighbourliness of brush strokes' (see A. Nicholson [ed.] Unknown Colour, Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson, London, 1987, pp. 216-217).