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拍品專文
In Nov 23-46 (Zennor Landscape), Ben Nicholson presents the viewer with an ordered array of layered reliefs in soft earthy tones of white, grey, brown and mustard, representing the beauty of the landscape of Cornwall's West Penwith Peninsula on a winter afternoon. The overlapping layers of the reliefs suggest the possibility of looking out over a distant horizon and picking out individual features of the natural landscape beyond. The grainy and scumbled surfaces of the carved boards seek to evoke the texture of the rocks, slate and stone walls that Nicholson found in Cornwall (an area that had become such a source of inspiration in his artistic life), and contrast with the delicately placed circles and pencil line in the composition, which reinforce the presence of a natural feature. The larger circle in the foreground is balanced by a recessed smaller one, which creates the perspective of a more distant object, encouraging the viewer to travel out and beyond the composition and contemplate their own experience of the natural world. The interplay of geometric symbols on a multi-dimensional picture surface in a naturalistic colour palette creates a composition which represents Nicholson's artistic aims during this important period of his output.
Having settled at Chy-an-Kerris, a large house at the end of Carbis Bay on the Cornish coast, with his wife Barbara Hepworth in 1942, the end of the war years was spent depicting the landscapes around him, and those seen from his studio window. The view to the north of the studio, 'looking out to the Atlantic horizon with St Ives, like Greece, coming out into the bay on one side & Godfrey Lighthouse & its rocks and N. Cornwall on the other', was evocatively described to his friend, the collector and curator Jim Ede, in a letter that he wrote on moving in (Ben Nicholson, letter to H.S. Ede, 29 August 1942, Kettle's Yard Archive, University of Cambridge). The move into a larger home enabled Nicholson to have his own working space for the first time since the outbreak of war, and he was able to create compositions in oil on a larger format again, so many of his wartime works having been created in gouache or on a very small scale because of the difficulty in accessing materials during the war.
Discussing the later reliefs of the post-war period, Peter Khoroche has commented that 'we see Nicholson constantly exploring and developing the potentialities of colour and texture just as much as form. It is as if all the subtle gradations of colour, tone and texture that he registered while drawing landscape and architecture were stored away, later to find expression in his carved surfaces where colour is not simply brushed onto the surface of the board but is made to seem indivisible from it. These formal and technical developments go hand in hand with Nicholson's expanding range of motifs and with his desire to make his work as inclusive a response to life as possible' (exhibition catalogue, Ben Nicholson: Chasing Out Something Alive: Drawings and Painted Reliefs 1950-75, Cambridge, Kettle's Yard, 2002, p. 26).
Having settled at Chy-an-Kerris, a large house at the end of Carbis Bay on the Cornish coast, with his wife Barbara Hepworth in 1942, the end of the war years was spent depicting the landscapes around him, and those seen from his studio window. The view to the north of the studio, 'looking out to the Atlantic horizon with St Ives, like Greece, coming out into the bay on one side & Godfrey Lighthouse & its rocks and N. Cornwall on the other', was evocatively described to his friend, the collector and curator Jim Ede, in a letter that he wrote on moving in (Ben Nicholson, letter to H.S. Ede, 29 August 1942, Kettle's Yard Archive, University of Cambridge). The move into a larger home enabled Nicholson to have his own working space for the first time since the outbreak of war, and he was able to create compositions in oil on a larger format again, so many of his wartime works having been created in gouache or on a very small scale because of the difficulty in accessing materials during the war.
Discussing the later reliefs of the post-war period, Peter Khoroche has commented that 'we see Nicholson constantly exploring and developing the potentialities of colour and texture just as much as form. It is as if all the subtle gradations of colour, tone and texture that he registered while drawing landscape and architecture were stored away, later to find expression in his carved surfaces where colour is not simply brushed onto the surface of the board but is made to seem indivisible from it. These formal and technical developments go hand in hand with Nicholson's expanding range of motifs and with his desire to make his work as inclusive a response to life as possible' (exhibition catalogue, Ben Nicholson: Chasing Out Something Alive: Drawings and Painted Reliefs 1950-75, Cambridge, Kettle's Yard, 2002, p. 26).