Sheila Fell: ‘beyond representation into poetry’

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Sheila Fell – A Passion for Paint

By Cate Haste

In a short foreword the artist Frank Auerbach defines the essence of the painting of his contemporary, Sheila Fell.  All too often, he once said, paintings can become inert, lifeless and remote from the feeling that inspired them, but Fell’s work is different.  It conveys her deep understanding and involvement in the landscape, the Cumbria of her childhood and early youth.  Auerbach then said that her life had been ‘fervent and adventurous’… but all too short (she died aged 48) and that the writing of this book was both necessary and appropriate.  He believed that it was time for a considered assessment of Fell’s life and work.

L.S.Lowry, who became a steadfast mentor throughout her life, sometimes accompanied Fell on her walks to find landscape subjects.  Settling under the rim of Skiddaw’s summit, Lowry witnessed the painter’s intimacy with the great glowering mountains and fells running down to the Solway Firth.  He admired the ‘poetic quality’ of her paintings with their organic contours and earthy colours, under the heavy, moving skies and he rejoiced in what he called ‘her sincerity’.

Fell never strayed far from her home town of Aspatria, nor did she need to, for Cumberland became her vocabulary, it’s ‘a sort of alphabet to me’ she said ‘…a language to express an experience…I know it so well’. She painted what was exciting for her, recording her attachment to the subject and conveying something new and fresh.  Her early works, particularly, appear haunted with overpowering mountains ‘black and hostile…like great forlorn prehistoric animals’, she said. 

She used a sombre palette, browns and olive-greys, petrol colours and sometimes a touch of viridian, and she piled ‘stern geometric structures’ (loosely related to Cezanne’s) in the foregrounds, giving the general idea of the worked landscape.  In a beautiful, early painting of 1955 now in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, agricultural or mining structures are dwarfed by the dominating, threatening mountains pressed against a silvery glimmer of fast-moving clouds.

 From these strong beginnings in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Fell’s work increased in intensity, her paint and brush handling became thicker and more varied.  Great, large, charcoal studies of the walls and gates and buildings near Aspatria (sadly only a few illustrated in the book – we could have used more) had an interesting, freeing effect on her paintings.  She loved painting her landscape under snow. Several ‘snowscapes’ are illustrated, sometimes just a dusting  on the fields leaving haystacks like lumps, and sometimes a thick, wet blanket heavy on roofs, slushy on roads and contrasting against the wet black stone walls of the farm buildings (one of these is illustrated on the book’s cover).

The author, Cate Haste, has produced an interesting, quick-paced and surprisingly investigative biography about a still slightly mysterious painter.  Her interest in Fell’s work came about because of a personal attachment to the Cumbrian landscape, and then the discovery of many of her paintings. She liked Fell’s boldness, which she once said was ‘beyond representation into poetry’ and was drawn by the charismatic personality of the artist. Clearly she has been hugely fortunate in having such a wealth of material to use, including many different kinds of source to consult.

Although Haste is quite an experienced writer and film-producer, she had never written about painting or the life of an artist (her earlier books concerned wives of statesmen and other important historical figures). Gratefully she acknowledges her sources, the many people who had known Fell, or had letters or documents about her working life. And there were numerous interviews and exhibition reviews, including a national broadcast with the author in October 2010.  In 2011 Haste won the ‘Lakeland Book of the Year’ Prize for this book.

Here and there we find good discussions of the paintings and important events in the painter’s life, but some areas or her work need more investigation. The charcoal drawings, for example (of which only four are illustrated), done in the late 1950s, show an ease of expression that indicates familiarity with the medium.  The drawings of Aspatria are brooding and mysterious like the paintings but they have near-abstract geometric forms and vertical trees or poles as stabilizing elements, like ‘pit-props…holding up the roof of the miner’s world’ as one critic remarked.  The drawings had a marked effect on the development of her painting from that time onwards.  This is one theme that the writer could have have pursued.

Haste is on firm ground when she has plenty of supporting material from journals and interviews with the artist.  In one of the last chapters (they are always too dramatically entitled) ‘Gathering Clouds’  we hear of Fell’s prevailing  gloom and strange feeling of dread even though she had been elected an Academician and had had a series of successful  exhibitions in London.  Working in a studio in London she felt penned in:

I long, in these dismal days to be working in the fields at home, or the moors of Yorkshire, there are so many unexpected variations in the actual thing than one could ever imagine in the studio. 

At this stage in her career dealers were interested in her work and the paintings were selling steadily.  Her work was looser and more varied now, the colours clearer, less murky.  Still attached to Cumbria, the paintings of Maryport (1965, purchased by the Tate Gallery) and Farm near Kirkbride (1979) with its lively, coloured flagstones, undulating hills and fast-moving clouds, are the best of her career. She then tried seascapes but they are dry and stiff, turbulent paintings painted thickly but without the authority or freedom of her landscapes. At the time she said:

I am very fond of the sea, how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is…[and what] if it didn’t stay and came on and on and on. That would be the end of it all…

The author treats Fell’s last years carefully, using letters to and from friends of the artist and interviews with colleagues. Her death on the 15December 1979 was a sudden shock.  It was reported in the press as ‘accidental…after a fall downstairs.’ But Haste speaks of entangling emotional difficulties and health problems  and, more tellingly, of a serious ‘dislocation from her roots’ as being the prime cause.

Sheila Fell – A Passion for Paint  by Cate Haste is published by Lund Humphries, London, 2010  £35.00 136 pp., fully illustrated in mono and colour. ISBN 9780853319795