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Sheila Fell (1931 - 1979)
Sheila Fell
(1931 - 1979) |
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landscapes, laborers Art Work
| Name: |
Sheila Fell |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Aspatria, Cumberland, England |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1931 |
| Death: |
1979 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
landscapes, laborers |
| Medium: |
oil painting |
| Method: |
oil painting |
| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
The artist's shapes are drawing and designing together. There are even hints of Permeke and Chagall, not only in her subjects--simple duties of the land, weddings, processions, and mysteries, but also in her boldness and concentration of a universe within a village gleams of Samuel Palmer. Sheila Fell has discovered, like Paul Nash and Ivon Hitchens, the secret of place.
Sheila Fell was the daughter of a miner, and born and brought up in the small mining town of Aspatria, Cumbria. Her working class background made her an unusual art student. She recalled the difficulties she faced at St Martin's School of Art in the catalogue for her South Bank Centre, and tour retrospective of 1990-1901. Fell's art focused on the relationship between workers and their environment, a choice of subject matter shaped by her background, and by art history. Her paintings of toiling laborers, such as Potato Pickers 1960, Arts Council Collection dearly draw upon her admiration for van Gogh. She can also be located firmly within her time, in tune with the taste for harshly realist subjects in mid twentieth century British culture, and her work was included in the exhibition The Forgotten Fifties that toured from the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, in 1984. Communities in Fell's art center on work, and she painted those she knew from her immediate surroundings, as in Houses Near No. 5 Pit (1957, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). The furrowed paint in Silage Heaps near Drumburgh H (1964), Swindon Art Collection) vividly represents churned earth.
In her feel for the dour, melancholy beauty to be found in the resolutely unpicturesque, Fell also shares an approach with L.S. Lowry. They met in 1956 after he bought two of her paintings, he was to own a total of fifteen of her works and they became friends. They visited Yorkshire together and the town of Maryport in Cumbria, where Fell made a series of paintings.In Lowry's An Island of 1942, Manchester City Art Galleries, a derelict house is marooned in the centre of an industrial wasteland,one of a series of paintings he made of solitary buildings. Fell's Deserted House on the Yorkshire Moors 1transposes a similar subject matter and mood, an abandoned home with dark windows, onto the purplish brown hills, under an oppressive sky.
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Samples of Work
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