Sheila Fell

On Sunday we popped up to Carlisle to visit Tullie House and view the exhibition of Sheila Fell's paintings.

As we looked around the exhibition it struck me that Fell's work is very much like Norman Nicholson's poetry: a celebration of working Cumbria - industry and farming, and so very different from the paintings of the Heaton-Coopers, who have a greater affinity with the works of William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, in their celebration of a beautiful Lake District.

L S Lowry championed Fells' work. To Lowry, Sheila Fell was the greatest landscape painter of the century. "If you asked me seriously - what artist did I like best of artists painting today? I would say Sheila Fell", he declared in 1968. "The poetic qualities of the landscape, a mountain landscape – she’s lived amongst it, was born amongst it. The quality is so poetic, it attracts me very much – more than anybody else today. I think she’s a very sincere artist."

Fell painted the landscape of her birth, not the tourist Lake District, but the tough Northern fells and the worked land surrounding her home town. It was a landscape moulded by mining and agriculture and subject to the fierce unpredictability of nature, between the flat coast of the Solway Firth and the massive dark shapes of the fells and mountains of the Lake District.

We thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition and are planning a second visit before Sheila Fell's paintings are returned to their various homes.