The Brooklyn Rail

The world “is the sum of its parts and the parts are all local,” wrote the Cumbrian painter Sheila Fell (1931–79) in 1961. She was describing her relationship to the mountains and mining landscapes of her childhood, the explicit subject of her oeuvre. Its implicit subject, however, is the metabolization of experience through paint. For the first time in thirty years, a major retrospective of Fell’s work is on view, hosted by the Tullie in Carlisle. Co-curated by J Andrew Bradley and Eleanor Bradley, who also compiled the forthcoming, long overdue catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, Sheila Fell: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings which gathers hundreds of works from private and public collections across the UK. Their cumulative impact is evidence of Fell’s profound engagement with the translation of sight as developed in expressionism. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to see Fell’s works, which resist photographic representation, in the flesh.

Fell was a miner’s daughter determined to become a painter. Her early life was shaped by the rhythms of Aspatria, the small mining and farming village from which she hailed in western Cumbria. When Fell was a teenager, she began a course of study at the Carlisle School of Art, now home of the museum displaying her retrospective.

It is a fitting return. A sense of place accumulates in her paintings through animated brushwork, felt as much as seen. Sites along the Solway Coast, Aspatria, and the fields of West Cumberland are rendered as if from the inside out. I attribute this acuity to her proximity and connection to mining. Like open pits where the earth has been pulled back to reveal its layers, the strata of rock feel present in the mass of her painted forms. Devoted to Paul Cézanne, Chaïm Soutine, and Constant Permeke, Fell made dark, fecund paintings that modulate their lineage, inhabiting the male-dominated history of landscape representation by breaking it open, living inside it. Haystack in a Field (1967) is a snowscape of thickened grays. Incremental shifts across the sky are as densely painted as the ground. Fell’s subtle earth tonalities form both surface and depth; a horse drawn cart is carved out of an economy of brown and black strokes. Her masterful paint handling unfolds in myriad subtleties: a well-placed buttery blue on the edge of a hay bale or vibrating slivers of darkness where horizon and sky meet.

Even after she left to live, exhibit, and teach in London, Fell remained deeply involved with Cumberland, once saying that she did not want to be thought of purely as a landscape painter, saying “I hope that the nearby community is always implicit in my landscapes.” While in London, Fell became an integral part of the postwar scene, working alongside painters like Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Prunella Clough. Auerbach’s drawing Head of Sheila Fell (1954) hangs in the entrance of the show, her dark eyes luminous behind streaks of black. She showed often at Beaux Arts Gallery, where she was supported by the artist and dealer Helen Lessore. For much of her life, the painter L. S. Lowry championed her work. She was inducted into the Royal Academy in 1974, becoming one of few women academicians at the time. She belongs in any history of postwar British painting. Yet, her life in London was marked by compartmentalization. As a working-class woman from the North, she built a tenuous network of support sustained through entanglements, partnerships, and patronage that skirted conventions. The freedom of her life in the city was in dialectic with the pace and world of her parents and the vulnerability of her position.

On December 15, 1979, after the recent opening of her solo show at New Grafton Gallery, Fell suffered a fatal fall down the steep stairs of her London apartment following a bout of heavy drinking. In the Tullie retrospective, an unfinished painting she was working on before her death has been meticulously restored. The underpainting of a large ochre mountain looms over a setting of farm buildings, gray supple earth beneath. This painting presents one of several unexplored trajectories in her work. Her landscapes of Cumberland are certainly the heart of the show, but an alcove of charcoal drawings show her love of working and reworking a line. There are oil portraits of her parents, small empty drawings of snowscapes, a wall-sized monochrome print of white-roofed houses along a country road. Some paintings look like they were made one hundred years before her time.

A critical fabulation of the work asks, had she lived another forty years, what images would Fell have made? Much like Auerbach, she used impasto as an instrument of sight and not a device, especially in her many snow paintings. In Snowscape, Cumbria (1977), Fell’s snow blankets the earth with chromatic whites, revealing new forms by obscuring the layers underneath. Abstraction becomes the means of excavation. The trajectory of Clough’s paintings come to mind, moving from the post-industrial landscapes of her early work into the heavily abstract later paintings. A shift in Fell’s relationship with abstraction feels imminent, but because of her death it remains a latency.

Fell is a painter’s painter, whose lyric expressionism can be experienced without being relegated to the genre of landscape, as she once feared. She also wrote that a painter “can be rooted in his dream, but lean out of it toward reality.” A lucid window into how she conceived of her practice, this leaning toward is the generous invitation of her work. If taken, it begins to restructure what we expect from representations of landscape, not as outside us, but a feeling formed within. Cumberland, in its dark brilliance, was Fell’s way into that feeling. We reap the generosity of her courage to remain with it.