Two books about Ben Nicholson

 There is a Ben Nicholson on show at the moment in Tate St Ives.

This is what prompted me to read more about him and I found two very different books in the library.

Sarah Jane Checkland wrote ‘Ben Nicholson - the Vicious Circles of his Life and Art’ published 2000.
The title tells her approach and in fact the only photographs included are of people not of the artist’s art.
The author has done extensive research and tells us as much as she can cram in a gossipy journalistic amusing way. 
Ben had a sad childhood and was sent to boarding school.He did not do well at art school.
He was asthmatic so unfit for service in WW1. He married three times and had various lovers, creating triangular relationships that caused Winifred and Barbara a lot of pain, but as the author points out he avoided triangles in his abstract works.
He and Barbara Hepworth formed the Penwith  Society in St Ives which broke away from the St Ives Society in order to promote abstract art.
There are many interesting details about Ben’s life and how abstraction became more popular after WW2, aided by Munnings’ reactionary speech 1949 at the Royal Academy denouncing it as rubbish,  which was  broadcast on the radio. 
By 1950 Nicholson’s work was a global success. He married his third wife, Felicitas Vogler and lived in Switzerland before returning to England.
He was involved  in Christian Science, had some Adlerian psychotherapy sessions, and gave credence to psychic beliefs and astrology.
Overall we get a complex picture of a man who was not very likeable although several women loved him intensely.

In contrast Virginia Button’s ‘Ben Nicholson’2007, in the Tate’s series on British artists, has many coloured photographs of Ben’s work and a narrative stripped back like one of his carefully crafted surfaces. 
Button is far more interested in art than is Checkland, whilst referring to the latter’s book, and gives us more to think about in analysing how Nicholson’s work developed and issues such as truth to materials, political and spiritual connections and how his work fits into art history. Ben responded to Japanese aesthetics and the author finds in his pictures ,which combine references to visually observed landscape and still life combined with abstract form and composition , ’poignant visual poetry. ‘

For clarity and artistic perspective on Ben Nicholson’s work read Virginia Button: for gossip and a critical account of his life it’s Checkland.
In this case the covers sum up the difference.

I saw a retrospective exhibition of Ben Nicholson some years back which showed how clearly he was affected by the work of others, changing his own in response. I thought the period when he was first in love with Barbara Hepworth was the most interesting when his personal life motivated figurative imagery expressed within abstract language - the time from which comes he picture I saw in Tate St Ives.

Huw Marshall , a Scottish artist in Penzance.

 Huw Marshall, an artist from Scotland who lives in Penzance

Huw had a week’s exhibition at Redwing Gallery in Penzance in May 2026 and he agreed to be interviewed by me soon after this in his studio there.

 

I have seen some of his large paintings - very striking, expressionist, full of movement and contrasts of colour and tone, showing figures dancing or moving.

The problem is because I know some details of his life I am expecting certain things and I can’t now tell what would be conveyed if I did not know what I do. 

Does the artist want us to react without knowing - I think so - I think he hesitates to be explicit and uses his art as a therapeutic help - as he says to keep himself sane - in the face of sorrow and protecting his audience from feelings to which he alludes in poetic oblique ways.

Huw told me he has a subject in mind for a new work,  ‘ the distance between two people when one of them is dead’ - a subject I know something about from my own life.

Huw Marshall is from Scotland but has lived in Penzance for years, devoting his time to painting since he retired from being a GP.
His life as a doctor was devoted to helping people and people are his subject.
He knows enough of anatomy to be able to draw figures from his imagination convincingly and he used to go to life classes.

Huw is not concerned with his art career, not expecting or pursuing wide sales or fame or thinking that these would help him, but having a studio at Redwing Gallery provides a safe although austere space for him and he can mix with people there and drink excellent coffee. It’s a community interest company run to help art and music, green issues and veganism flourish and has become the hub where many interesting groups and individuals meet. 

Artists Huw admires include Breughel, Bosch, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, artists of  the First World War  and the living Glaswegian artist of the war in Bosnia- Peter Howson.

On the wall is a large 12 x 5 foot composition in grey tones based loosely on the Last Supper but with many figures which he refers to with humour as ‘Last orders at the Bowling Club Social’. This has poured out spontaneously in a few days, carried out with 6 inch brushes. It’s not finished yet.

In his recent show there was a similar sized one of three angels, using a limited palette, showing them as strong, interlocking, vivid but calming.
Asked if he believes in angels Huw says he does, as a something that looks after him, whilst he also has a scientific non religious outlook.

He is an artist of paradoxical contrasts who works from the heart and makes a rather wild and strange impression, original and worth seeking out.

His beloved female partner was murdered a few years ago and the tragic intensity of that I think vibrates within Huw’s work.

Newlyn Society of Artists at Tremenheere until April 19th. 2026

 The Newlyn Art Society has its April show at Tremenheere- selected by film critic Mark Kermode, ‘Eye of the Lens’. No theme was set. Open daily 10.30 t0 4.30 with free admission until April 19th

 

I arrived frazzled by tense driving on narrow roads but on leaving after an hour examining the probably 100 exhibits by almost as many artists I somehow felt more equal to the road challenges and coped with getting lost with equanimity so maybe the art had left me somehow slightly braver.

It’s quite hard work taking in such variety although the artists’ statements can help where works baffle. I would have liked cvs or brief biographies also and a photo of the artist.

 

One of the people who use video gets a whole room for their evocative installation using toys and objects from their childhood - Mike Thorpe. Two vases, one with tulips standing up and the other with them collapsed as they decay seemed a metaphor for our brief lives à la Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam- ‘the flower that blooms today tomorrow dies’  - preceded in the poem by ‘one thing is certain and the rest is lies’. The artist’s mother had died when they made this. The sounds of a child’s xylophone add to the solemn sadness and permeate the rest of the show.

Janet McKeown gets her own video screen to show badgers and rabbits on a night recording video with a soundtrack on headphones of busy human chatter contrasting with nature’s quiet woodland activity.

 

The other, silent, video contributions are unfortunately put together on a loop, at least with the times given and with seating but it seems likely most visitors won’t last  out to see them especially as some move at a glacial pace.. The drawn animation by Karen Lorens stands out as it’s fast paced and amusing.

A photo of Ken Turner by Patrick Shanahan also impresses in its precise recording of the artist, now a phenomenon himself as he is aged 99, and Ken has a powerful anguished painting of sorrow upstairs ‘weeping world’.

 

What an odd building the gallery is with no internal staircase so you have to walk up the slope and round to see the upper floor.

I found Phil Booth’s 3d work ‘Lion Hunt - Golden Horse’ baffling but so well made.

The small figures contrasting Stone Age with Tin Can age confronting one another were clearer - but then the title corrects my interpretation as it’s called ‘Bal Maidens and the Tinnie Boys’ by Julia Giles.

 

I liked the way Sally Tripptree had assembled small painted elements into a whole by stitching.

 

‘New year morning ‘by Stuart Ross was wonderfully clear but impossible to photograph without my reflection in the glass. It shows the moon in a clear blue sky.

Many of the NSA artists I am not aware of exhibiting anywhere else, which is where cvs could help, but it makes me think how studded Cornwall and possibly most of the world is with artists, addicted to making art which rarely sells but piles up, often unseen even. 

Later that evening there was art on tv from cave walls in France made 33,000 years ago. No one really knows why those artists made theirs. Their drawings were just as good, as vivid and somehow necessary as what we do now.