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Quick summary
- Price
- Free
- Running time
- 1 hour 15 minutes
- Venue
-
- Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
Additional information
Event description
Join Professor J Andrew Bradley and Dr Eleanor Bradley for a joint talk about the artist Sheila Fell’s life and work, followed by a Q & A session.
Since retiring as academics in 2016, Andrew and Eleanor have pursued their long-standing interest in modern British art and curated the exhibition Sheila Fell: Cumberland on Canvas. The exhibition was first hosted at Tullie in 2024 and will be on show at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens from 10 April 2025.
The painter Sheila Fell was born in 1931 into a working-class mining family in the West Cumbrian town of Aspatria. After spending two years at Carlisle School of Art she left Cumbria to study at St Martin’s School of Art in London at the age of 19: she lived and worked in London for the rest of her life, where she became one of the finest landscape artists of her generation, and one of the very few female Royal Academicians of her day.
The talk will discuss how Fell’s upbringing in West Cumbria informed her art, and highlight the various individuals who played a pivotal role in her career, including the legendary gallerist Helen Lessore and the artist L. S. Lowry. Andrew and Eleanor will illustrate, using numerous examples of works from ’Sheila Fell: Cumberland on Canvas’, how Fell’s style of painting evolved as she developed as an artist, with reference to the European masters that she most admired. They will conclude by discussing why, despite all her many achievements, Fell has, in recent years, been overshadowed by some of her more famous contemporaries.
Sheila Fell: Cumberland on Canvas is a touring exhibition from Tullie, Carlisle, curated by Eleanor and Andrew Bradley. Further support comes from Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund, and The Granada Foundation.