Victoria Street
Stromness
KW16 3AA
The Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, and The Holburne Museum in Bath are delighted to announce Dreams of the Everyday, a new exhibition which brings together the paintings of Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981) and Andrew Cranston (b. 1969, Hawick, UK).
Dreams of the Everyday is curated by the designer and collector Jonathan Anderson, in collaboration with Andrew Cranston and the gallerist Richard Ingleby.
The exhibition explores the connections and contrasts in paintings by Nicholson and Cranston, many of which share a delight in ordinary, often domestic, realities – drawing on daily-life, memory and imagination, and incorporating figures, interiors and glimpses of nature. Both artists’ practices are at once rooted in the real world, while going beyond conventionality and the commonplace to evoke a sense of non-physical, sometimes mystical, and occasionally visionary, realities.
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.
Despite such disparity in circumstances, and their distinctly different voices, their works sit well in each other’s company, and in juxtaposing their paintings, the exhibition seeks to reveal something new about both.
Highlighted in the exhibition are several of the single and group portraits that Nicholson painted between the wars, which speak lyrically of the life she led bringing up a young family in her adopted home of Cumbria, in the north of England. Her images of home life, especially of her children, provide a fascinating point of comparison with Cranston’s paintings in which childhood, memory and association are also often powerful ingredients. At the same time, with their flattened space and tipped-up tabletops, Nicholson’s paintings from the 1920s and 1930s offer an art-historical bridge between Cranston’s works and the early days of European modernism.
The Pier Arts Centre is open Tuesday to Saturday between 1030 and 1700, and admission is free.
