If you’regoing anywhere for a day over Christmas and the New Year, head to Carlisle andTullie House, where you’ll find an absolutely enthralling retrospective of thework 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, whereyou’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 movingvisions of Britain in the 20th century. Tullie House has over 70 ofthem on display, and they are unmissable.

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

Fell’slandscapes are demonic in their intensity and depth – farm-houses cower beneathlowering mountains, accumulations of mass and gravity that seem to bend out ofshape the constrained, crushed figures of labourers, horse-and-cart or theempty space of a lane between bulbous haystacks where the figures seem to bestruggling to escape.  And above all thisthe huge immensity of the mountains and the wild uncontrollable energy of cloudand sky convolves in fury.  The Lake Districtis, of course, a post-industrial landscape, strewn with the spoil heaps of abandonedmine-workings; Fell’s vision is chthonic, about as far from the chocolate-boxscenery 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 slowviolence of the geology that gave them their subject. 

And shebrings the same precise intensity to her visions of the Solway and the industrialtowns of the coast.  Seascapes of Allonbydepict low houses battered by waves and light. The show includes two of her paintings of Maryport harbour, where a seaof 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 lightwithin 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 seeis the turmoil of emotion experienced with rural intensity and then recollectedamongst the tranquility of a great city. 

The showmakes much of her friendship and sketching trips with LS Lowry, and while they’rearguably both visual poets of the industrial North, it strikes me that Fell hasa power that far outdoes Lowry’s cold urban vistas and naïve automata.  If Fell’s images and colour have referencepoints then they’re the farm-labourers of Van Gogh, JMW Turner’s overwhelmingskies and seascapes, the smooth light curves and contours of Edward Munch’slate-career agricultural paintings – brooding cabbage-harvesters under lowskies. 

Don’t befooled into thinking that this makes her merely an inheritor of titanicinfluences.  Fell is utterly anduncompromisingly personal and her work embodies the authenticity of Cumbria – alandscape that shaped and is shaped by its people. I left the exhibitionintoxicated by the power of Fell’s vision, grieving that it was cut so abruptlyshort.  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 insearch of more may also wish to track down the late Cate Haste’s sadlyout-of-print Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (Lund Humphries, 2010 –ISBN: 9780853319795).