Solid granite-grey back to back houses lined the ‘long tape of a road leading from the woods on the outskirts up past the gas-works to the cemetery and the market square’ – the ancient Roman road which led from Carlisle to the Maryport coast. Sheila Fell was born on 20 July 1931 in a small terraced cottage between Millers Farm and the Primitive Methodist church on Queen Street, Aspatria. Her legacy is that she alters our own way of seeing and feeling. And the more you look at a painting, the more alchemaic and magical its impact. Landscape is metamorphosed through the prism of her imagination, sensibility and her intense vision. We experience it anew – in her heightened internalised image.
Her close scrutiny of colours, of the organic contours of the land and the sudden atmospheric shifts which transform light and sky, and her innate understanding of the relationship of humanity to the earth make you see differently. It might be anywhere in the world, but it happens to be in Cumberland.’Īlthough her work falls within a recognisable tradition of English landscape painting, it is transformed by the emotional intensity, focus and expressive power she brought to her work throughout her abruptly curtailed life. ‘Its news is all local news, as every bit of earth is home to somebody. ‘The world is a sum of its parts and the parts are all local’, Fell wrote. All the landscape is lived in, modulated, worked on and used by man.’ Through her focus on place, confined within the narrow radius of her recalled past (she rarely ventured more than 20 miles from her home town) Fell discovered a poetic language for humanity’s patient struggle for survival in a forbidding landscape, and the interdependence of land, people, work and nature. She saw in Cumberland ‘a cross section of life. It was where her imagination had been formed, and that inner store of images exercised an intense power over her. ‘I have no interest in any painting which does not have its roots in reality,’ she wrote. Though she lived in London, she returned to Cumberland for her raw material and her inspiration. 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. Throughout her short career – she died tragically early in 1979, aged only 48 – she painted the landscape of her birth, not the tourist Lake District, but the tough Northern fells and the worked land surrounding her home town. The quality is so poetic, it attracts me very much – more than anybody else today. ‘The poetic qualities of the landscape, a mountain landscape – she’s lived amongst it, was born amongst it.
‘If you asked me seriously - what artist did I like best of artists painting today? I would say Sheila Fell’, he declared. To Lowry, Sheila Fell was the greatest landscape painter of the century. Lowry drew an industrial landscape entirely from his imagination. Each carried their own singular landscape in their mind’s eye. Fell made drawings of the landscape in front of her, mapping the outline of a painting she would finish on her return to London. Lowry hired a car as usual and the two painters settled down facing the fells under the rim of Skiddaw. Ever since he had discovered her at her first solo London exhibition five years earlier, he had taken his holidays with her parents, Jack and Ann Fell, in their terraced cottage in the small town of Aspatria, west Cumberland. On a day in late summer around 1960, the painter LS Lowry set off with Sheila Fell on one of their regular painting expeditions to the Cumbrian fells.