Extract from Sheila Fell
A Passion for Paint

Chapter One 

A Small Windswept Town

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. 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. 

Lowry hired a car as usual and the two painters settled down facing the fells under the rim of Skiddaw. 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 drew an industrial landscape entirely from his imagination. Each carried their own singular landscape in their mind’s eye. 

To Lowry, Sheila Fell was the greatest landscape painter of the century. ‘If you asked me seriously - what artist did I like best of artists painting today? I would say Sheila Fell’, he declared  [in 1968]. ‘The poetic qualities of the landscape, a mountain landscape – she’s lived amongst it, was born amongst it. The quality is so poetic, it attracts me very much – more than anybody else today. I think she’s a very sincere artist.’

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. 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.  

Though she lived in London, she returned to Cumberland for her raw material and her inspiration. 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. She saw in Cumberland ‘a cross section of life. 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. It had universal resonance. ‘The world is a sum of its parts and the parts are all local’, Fell wrote. ‘Its news is all local news, as every bit of earth is home to somebody. So I would like to make a village. It might be anywhere in the world, but it happens to be in Cumberland.’  

Although 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. 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. Landscape is metamorphosed through the prism of her imagination, sensibility and her intense vision. We experience it anew – in her heightened internalised image.  And the more you look at a painting, the more alchemaic and magical its impact. Her legacy is that she alters our own way of seeing and feeling. 

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. 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. Surrounding the town, under the wide, wind-blown skies, were flat fields of barley and potatoes which stretched to the sea. Closer yet were the still-functioning collieries, with their chimneys, winding houses and slag heaps dominating the skyline. Beyond was the distant silhouette of the looming mountains. 

Work on the land or underground dictated the rhythms of life in the bleak small town. The day, Fell recalled, was punctuated by going-to or coming-from work: ‘Miners strung out along the road or crouching on Walter Wilson’s corner with bait boxes, shivering against the morning cold. Farm carts, ricketing past the house, full of hay or turnips, and cows threading their way from milking sheds to grazing fields.’ And in the evening, ‘when one by one the lights would glow from the windows of the houses, the next lot of men would turn out for the night-shift, everything silent except perhaps for the moaning of the wind blowing from the sea across to the mountains and the stirring of the cattle in the farms’.   

Fell’s profound sense of security in the tethered small town was punctuated by uncertainty and childhood fears bred of a vivid imagination. In the long Northern winters came ‘the mystery and terror, sudden warmth and snugness of dark nights….The trees near our house would sough all night and often I would hear the warning cry of a bird. I used to lie in bed, feeling tremendously secure, thinking that I wasn’t that poor night-bird being chased by its terrifying enemy.’ In her bedroom at night, light from the oil lamp shone on her red eiderdown which ‘made it come alive and move: the room would be brimful of shadows.’ Dimly visible was a glass case filled with artificial flowers and fruit, and lying underneath the foliage a small white naked baby made of wax or pottery, Sheila never knew which. Beside it were the Family Bible and her father’s black box of ebony hairbrushes. 

Her recollections are rich in finely observed images of colour and warmth; the attic full of sunlight and the smell of fruit from the apples her mother stored there; downstairs the ‘huge Victorian open fireplace and chunky black oven’; at breakfast in winter, ‘the chimney yawning like a black cavern at the back of the unlit fireplace but the bright, fragile gas-mantle would send a cosy glow trembling across the tablecloth and plates’; in the back room was her mother’s organ, ‘tall and sombre with black and white knobs, yellow teeth and red-carpeted pedals’. When Fell was confined to bed with diptheria aged five, her mother collected rolled-up leaves from blackberry bushes and put inside each a tiny patterned spider. She would throw them, heaped in her apron, onto the bed. ‘The variety of these spiders’ colours was a constant source of anticipation with the unrolling of each leaf. Hard blue ovals, delicate green, pink or lemon smudges scrawled with thin lines, luminous and strange they ran over the coverlet of my bed,’ Fell wrote. 

There was also dread – of an old man’s loud, sharp cough in the blackness of night, from which she fled in terror; the fearful impression made on her by an old woman, her mother’s friend, who told her when she had misbehaved that: ‘when I died I would go to Hell, ending her proclamation with a description of how it would be. …I remember feeling completely isolated and aghast for hours afterwards, walking round the garden being depressed by the wet blades of grass and no-one to turn to.’ The Plymouth Brethren dropped off leaflets about resurrection, heaven and hell ‘decorated with the most devastating pictures and I’d sit by the fire, adrenalin racing, absorbing them with a sort of fascinated horror.’  The ‘strange world’ of the cemetery enthralled her. On visits with her mother to  her grandmother’s grave, she collected water from a well ‘embedded like a green toad, magical and old’ in a hollow strewn with dead blossoms from the graves. The aloofness and perfection of a stone angel rising from the green ground caught her imagination. The vicar loomed ‘darkly’ in the vestry.

Her sense of trembling at the edge of dread was reinforced by her father’s uncertain employment in the declining pits surrounding Aspatria. Both her parents, John (Jack’) Fell and Ann Fell came from mining families. From the 14th century onwards, the Fells had been modestly prosperous farmers around the Solway Plain, but the land had gradually been lost and Sheila’s  grandfather, Joseph Fell, with a family of ten children,  had been forced to go for work in the pits. A tribal sense that the Fells had been a cut above the rest but had fallen on hard times bred ambition to succeed, according to younger family members: ‘Getting out and getting on was part of the Fell ethos’, says her cousin, Daniel McDowell, though Sheila’s father, Jack, was more easy going. He was friendly and amusing, an open and warm-hearted man with a sharp wit – ‘he was the funniest man I’ve ever known, a very sensitive and tender man under that austere face’.

At 11, Sheila passed the entrance exam for the Thomlinson Girls Grammar School,  8 miles away in Wigton. Her mother’s bachelor brother helped out with the fees, and Ann Fell took a job in a tailor’s shop, where Sheila stopped by after school for tea. As so often, for Sheila the workroom was a juxtaposition of security with dread: ‘warm with a coal fire stove at one end and an odd glimmering light which seemed to focus itself on the baleful shapes of dark cloth hanging bat-like around the walls.’ She was already familiar with her parents’ small stock of books, ‘their old Victorian covers and faded sepia inscriptions carefully bound’, which included Burns, Grey and Oliver Goldsmith and an illustrated  tome on the Russian social revolution; an older cousin, Reginald Fell, had introduced her to Lamb’s ‘Tales of Shakespeare’. Now in the school library she became an avid reader, building the foundations for what her friends later described as an original and cultivated mind. Her younger cousin Daniel noted when she was 17 how ideas and the life of the mind mattered to her. ‘She was very private, very self-preoccupied, and had a powerful inner life – not touchable emotionally. I was frightened of her because of her intensity,’ and he noted also her self-doubt – a trait common in the Fell family, he said. 

She took her work very seriously, her form teacher (also her art teacher), Catherine Rooke, observed, and she had a great sense of humour: ‘She was witty, outspoken and had no fear of voicing her opinions.’ At a Founder’s Day rehearsal Rooke ‘began to feel the strength of her personality…I remember thinking, ‘Here’s a character!’ I was amused and intrigued by her complete detachment from everything that was going on around her. But her mind seemed to be deeply occupied, far away, somewhere. While other girls fidgeted she sat very still, with her head slightly tilted back into her shoulders, her eyes gazing wide, unseeing, her hands folded together on her lap.’ 

Her art teacher noticed in her an impressive determination and a nascent talent worth developing. Though Sheila later said she was ‘only messing about with colours’ at school, her assimilation of impressions and her powers of observation were acute. In the course of a school trip to Holland in 1947 – the first time she had ever left Cumberland,  she was overwhelmed by an image that would grip her imagination for years to come. It was not in Holland (though she wrote a vivid description of her visit to the Arnhem battlefields for the School Magazine) but on the train journey through the gateway to the Lake District in Westmoreland, no more than 30 miles from Aspatria:

“The mountains, after the flatness of Gelderland, seemed to force themselves, black and hostile almost through the window of the carriage. Slab over slab they rose up and enveloped us like a gigantic frightening wall nearly touching  the glass and shutting out the sky. They hung over the train like great forlorn prehistoric animals and although I’d lived among them for years, it was the first time I ever saw them.’  

After passing her School Certificate, she joined the Sixth Form where her art work became more outstanding as the year progressed. ‘She worked with absolute concentration and seriousness. Her questioning eagerness to learn and her total involvement when she was painting or drawing were very impressive,’ Catherine Rooke remembers. By now her teacher knew she was good enough to take up art and urged her to apply to the local College of Art at Carlisle. 

It was not an easy decision. Sheila was certain of one thing: ‘I didn’t know what to do in life apart from getting away from Aspatria. I looked at the daily grind of people there and knew it wasn’t for me. I kept on telling myself – you’re going to get away.’ Her music teacher thought her good enough to go to music college and her headmistress urged her to take up languages at university – it was more secure. There was no future to be made in art, she warned, especially for a woman. 

Sheila had to be persuaded that she was good enough to take up art as a career. Her parents were uncertain about such an unfamiliar path. Jack feared there would be no job and no money. Both would have preferred her to be a musician.  Though she’d ‘got a cap and gown for music she wanted to be an artist – so he let her do it,’ says her cousin Lilian Buchanan. Anne Fell said, ‘Sheila must decide’, and told Sheila ‘ do what you think’s best and will make you happiest’. With the help of Catherine Rooke’s future husband, art teacher Maurice Campbell-Taylor, Sheila got a county scholarship to study  at Carlisle College of Art. She left in trepidation in September 1948. She still travelled 20 miles home by bus each evening to her parents in Aspatria, but it was a new and daunting world. 

Her start was unpromising. She spent her first day in a cold, depressing room surrounded by stuffed birds in glass cases among city students who rather looked down on rural Aspatria, and who seemed ‘so sophisticated and terrifying  I didn’t dare speak a word to anyone.’ This was ‘a totally new, strange world – strange people, and I really hated it.’ But gradually her tearful returns to home lessened. She spent her days ‘laboriously working on classical designs of acanthus leaves and Persian birds in thickets’. Of all the courses – architecture, anatomy,  history of art, life drawing, composition – she found perspective the most difficult. Later she protested at her 13 year old daughter’s class being taught classical perspective, constricting them to ‘seeing things in a certain way – Picasso had spent years unlearning perspective,’ she declared passionately.  

It was a financial struggle, however. Her grant covered fees, but her parents had to help out with materials which were expensive and bus fares they could ill afford. She could borrow books, but educational trips were too costly so she sat alone in the empty school. She had not as yet mined the intuitive vision of landscape she found later, but she showed a confident command of draughtsmanship. (*Illus – Brayton Woods, Carnival) In breaks, she took refuge in the library, nurturing her intellectual curiosity, submerged in the lives of painters, sculptors and poets. Van Gogh, Modigliani and Daumier appealed to her, though her interest spanned the entire history of art. The more she read, the clearer became her desire to paint.   

She received little encouragement. Women painters were few, and with rare exceptions, not taken seriously by the art establishment. The College Principal was passionately committed to art related to industry and had links with Carlisle’s several textile factories, including the largest, Morton Sundour Fabrics. ‘They perpetually told me, all the time I was there, that I would never make a painter, my talent was for textile design,’ said Sheila, thinking, ‘If I’m not careful, they’re going to get me into Morton Sundour’. Her desperation grew: ‘She told me ‘I want to be a painter. I don’t want to do design or teach, or anything but PAINTING,’ recalls Catherine Campbell Taylor, who already saw in Sheila ‘a visionary with unwavering ideals and an infinite depth of feeling and sensitivity’.  She told her to ‘hold on to the idea and do not let anyone or anything divert you from it’ and encouraged her to start thinking about moving to London. 

Sheila’s determination won. After two years, she passed the Intermediate, applied and was accepted at St Martin’s  School of Art, and set off for London with a grant of a hundred pounds a year. As she left Aspatria, she ‘watched the road become longer as the car slowly moved further away from the dark house with its dim line of cornflowers in the front garden. My parents stood waving until finally I could see only their hands flickering like birds against a night sky and by the time we turned Brewery Corner the whole silent village was blurred.’ Later she wrote to her mother, 

‘I often sit in front of the fire & think the whole evening just about [the past]. I don’t think another person on this earth had a happier childhood than I had, or more security – but being used to that does make things so much harder when you find yourself out in the world.’ 

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