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A selection of work by Sheila Fell

Date: Thursday 26 September – Wednesday 6 November 2024
Location: Clare Hall, Herschel Road, Cambridge CB3 9AL

Clare Hall is proud to present an exhibition of paintings by Sheila Fell. The exhibition is free, and runs from 26 September to 6 November 2024 in Clare Hall’s Main Building.

Clare Hall is proud to present a selection of work by Sheila Fell, in advance of a major re-evaluation of her art and career. A retrospective of her paintings and drawings will open at Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in Carlisle, soon after the closure of this show, and will be followed in 2025 by the publication of Andrew and Eleanor Bradley’s catalogue raisonné, with the renowed art publisher, Lund Humphries.

Sheila Fell remains a legendary figure in Cumbria, yet is noticeably absent in recent narratives on women’s art.  Born into a poor coal-mining family in West Cumbria, Fell left her home town of Aspatria at the age of 19 to study at St Martin’s School of Art where her fellow students included Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Like them, her work caught the attention of Helen Lessore, the director of the Beaux Arts Gallery in Mayfair who, in 1955, gave Fell the first of five solo exhibitions at her gallery. In 1969 Fell became as Associate Member of the Royal Academy, and five years later, one of the then very few female Royal Academicians. Although Fell lived and worked in London for her entire professional life, her paintings and drawings focus almost exclusively on the rural countryside around her childhood home of Aspatria and the Solway Plain. If narrow in terms of geographic focus, her work addresses the universal theme of man’s dependence on the land for survival. Drawing on the European masters she most admired – Daumier, Cézanne, Permeke, Soutine, and above all, Van Gogh, Fell found new ways to express her unique vision of the worked land of rural Cumberland – potato picking scenes, carts on country lanes, harvesting scenes and fields and farmyards under snow. Her poetic vision of Cumberland transcends reality and her paintings have an expressive power equalled by few British artists. Tragically Fell died in 1979 when she was only 48 and arguably at the height of her artistic powers. Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s figurative art was considered unfashionable and Fell’s early death denied her the chance to witness the resurgence of interest in figurative painting.

Many of her best works are dark and have a melancholy quality about them – ‘Cumberland is very dark’, noted Fell, ‘but being dark it is also very brilliant’ – and in her paintings and drawings Fell captures the ‘brilliance’ of rural Cumbria.

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