Review - Sheila Fell: Cumberland On Canvas

 If you’re going anywhere for a day over Christmas and the New Year, head to Carlisle and Tullie House, where you’ll find an absolutely enthralling retrospective of the work of Cumbrian landscape artist Sheila Fell. And if you’re going to Carlisle, make sure you take the high road through the hills of the Lake District, where you’ll be able to experience the original landscapes – if you’re lucky, there’ll be snow – that she transmuted into some of the most powerfully moving visions of Britain in the 20^th century. Tullie House has over 70 of them on display, and they are unmissable.

Sheila Fell (1931 – 1979) was a West Cumbrian coal-miner’s daughter who studied painting at St Martin’s School Of Art, exhibited in London in the ’50s and ’60s, was elected to the Royal Academy in 1969, a time when the membership was overwhelmingly male, and died far too young, when she still very clearly had decades of visionary productivity ahead of her.  The retrospective at Tullie House is the first such of any size in over 20 years and really should be grasped, gazed upon and cherished.

Fell’s landscapes are demonic in their intensity and depth – farm-houses cower beneath lowering mountains, accumulations of mass and gravity that seem to bend out of shape the constrained, crushed figures of labourers, horse-and-cart or the empty space of a lane between bulbous haystacks where the figures seem to be struggling to escape.  And above all this the huge immensity of the mountains and the wild uncontrollable energy of cloud and sky convolves in fury.  The Lake District is, of course, a post-industrial landscape, strewn with the spoil heaps of abandoned mine-workings; Fell’s vision is chthonic, about as far from the chocolate-box scenery of the day-tripper as you can get, and utterly authentic.  And all this fashioned out of precise, weighty strokes of paint that seem to have been applied with the implacable slow violence of the geology that gave them their subject. 

And she brings the same precise intensity to her visions of the Solway and the industrial towns of the coast.  Seascapes of Allonby depict low houses battered by waves and light.  The show includes two of her paintings of Maryport harbour, where a sea of battered pewter hangs ominously above the town.  These, and the brooding townscapes of her home, suggest that an entire vision of nature and society can be conjured out of light within a bicycle-ride of  Aspatria.  Fell sketched rapidly, in Cumbrian nature, and then worked with paint and canvas back in her London studio – what you see is the turmoil of emotion experienced with rural intensity and then recollected amongst the tranquility of a great city. 

The show makes much of her friendship and sketching trips with LS Lowry, and while they’re arguably both visual poets of the industrial North, it strikes me that Fell has a power that far outdoes Lowry’s cold urban vistas and naïve automata.  If Fell’s images and colour have reference points then they’re the farm-labourers of Van Gogh, JMW Turner’s overwhelming skies and seascapes, the smooth light curves and contours of Edward Munch’s late-career agricultural paintings – brooding cabbage-harvesters under low skies. 

Don’t be fooled into thinking that this makes her merely an inheritor of titanic influences.  Fell is utterly and uncompromisingly personal and her work embodies the authenticity of Cumbria – a landscape that shaped and is shaped by its people. I left the exhibition intoxicated by the power of Fell’s vision, grieving that it was cut so abruptly short.  The show is, simply, unmissable.

Sheila Fell: Cumberland On Canvas – Tullie House, Carlisle, to 16 March 2025.

https://tullie.org.uk/events/sheila-fell-cumberland-on-canvas/

Those in search of more may also wish to track down the late Cate Haste’s sadly out-of-print Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (Lund Humphries, 2010 – ISBN: 9780853319795).