Cranborne Chase Pictures
Copyright Cranborne Chase Pictures 2005-2008©
EQ Nicholson
EQ was a gifted textile artist and for a short period of her life, after coming to live on Cranborne Chase, a painter. She studied briefly at the Slade, under Tonks, who irritated her. She went to Paris to study the art of Batik.
On her return to England she worked with Marion Dorn in London before marrying Kit Nicholson.
EQ’s work shows her strong feeling for abstract forms; spots, lines, spacial elements, combined with her delight in nature and domestic objects. She employed with immense skill the simplicity of modernist composition devices with a richly sensuous, sophisticated use of colour, texture, and light.
EQ came with her children to live on Cranborne Chase at the outbreak of war. Her husband Kit Nicholson, the modernist architect, was stationed near Southampton. Artistic friends, such as John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Olive Cook, and Edwin Smith came to stay; the immediate surroundings provided the focus for textile designs, paintings, drawings and photographs. Craxton recalls a home where ‘’the sofas, chairs, and cushions were covered with fabrics by Nancy Nicholson and EQ from their own lino-blocks. The walls were hung with paintings by all the Nicholsons; William, Mabel, Winefred, and Ben’’.
This is the environment that EQ created that Tim Nicholson and his sisters grew up in.