Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Ben Nicholson was fond of recalling a remark attributed to Georges Braque that ‘you can explain everything about [painting] apart from the bit that matters’. With his aversion to the ‘museum mind’ that nailed things down Nicholson felt that an individual’s direct experience of art would undoubtedly be diminished by the limitations of a theory or the singularity of an explanation. For him language was obliged to offer more freedom. Nicholson was a prolific and creative writer adopting a distinct and playful style that at times came close to emulating the rhythms and poise of his wider aesthetic. In hand-written letters to friends and family words and sentences take on their own lyricism linking and spiralling around the page in calligraphic flourishes punctuated with dashes and dots and occasionally small sketches of recently completed works. In discussing art and the act of making language is used to conjure up poetic equivalents to the creative encounter. The composition of an abstract painting might be aligned with the interplay of forces in a football match or the pirouetting movement of a cat; the light emanating from a carved relief equated with an unseen landscape or an imaginative world. (LL)