Cut to the Chase

Circles and Tangents sounds like a show of abstract art, but actually the title is somewhat misleading. As Vivienne Light, the exhibition’s curator and author of the accompanying book, explains, the circles are intended to denote networks of artists (not the circular forms in a Ben Nicholson painting, though Nicholson is included in the show), and the tangents are really digressions. Clear? Put more simply, the exhibition focuses on art made on or about Cranborne Chase, the lovely unspoilt stretch of Dorset landscape once William the Conqueror’s hunting ground and more recently the inspiration for countless painters and sculptors. The work on show is largely figurative and much of it is landscape-based, but there is pleasing variety among the exhibits, and a stimulating range of known and unknown artists.

The visitor to the exhibition is greeted by EQ Nicholson’s fine oil landscape entitled ‘Boveridge’ (c.1949), a lucid and light-filled painting of evocative and sensuous shapes. EQ (as she was affectionately known) is one of the revelations of this show. Married to Kit Nicholson, the architect and younger brother of Ben, who designed Augustus John’s modernist studio at Fryern Court near Fordingbridge, the charismatic EQ was a talented artist. She worked as a fabric designer and interior decorator, usually in conjunction with her husband, and did most of her painting between 1940 and 1955. It was in the earlier part of those years that the young John Craxton regularly stayed with her at Alderholt Mill, between Boveridge and Fordingbridge.

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Craxton always maintained that he first found himself as a painter at Alderholt. Certainly his friendship with EQ was a close one, and influence and inspiration flowed read-ily between them. This can be seen from the juxtaposition in the exhibition’s first room of EQ’s ‘Stream at the Mill House’ (c.1943)