‘As a painter I have, as Bonnard put it, ‘a morbid sensitivity to surface’, and this aspect of Nicholson’s work is one that I keep returning to. In her early paintings there is this shifting tonal fog within her paint that keeps the eye ever so slightly active, as opposed to a total, inert flatness that stops the eye dead. There’s a certain hesitancy in her touch, doubt even, that is so gentle. A warm human wobble.
—Andrew Cranston
5b presents a new title co-published with Ingleby Gallery on the occasion of Dreams of the everyday, an exhibition which brings together the paintings of Winifred Nicholson (b. 1893, d. 1981) and Andrew Cranston (b. 1969) at The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, and The Holburne Museum in Bath.
The two painters, though distanced by time and place, are connected by their commitment to a kind of painting that values intimacy over showmanship. The earliest and most recent works in the exhibition are separated by a century – and whilst Nicholson often travelled from her base at Bankshead in Cumbria to paint in Cornwall, Paris, Greece, and on the west coast of Scotland, Cranston, originally from Hawick, has resolutely remained living and working in Glasgow.
The richly illustrated publication features extracts of text by both artists and a conversation between Cranston, gallerist Richard Ingleby and the exhibition's curator Jonathan Anderson, and would not exist without the generosity of JW Anderson Ltd.