This new publication explores the whole career of Winifred Nicholson with a special emphasis on her theories of colour. Using specific paintings to examine her ideas and writings about colour the book includes her late 'prismatic' pictures which have never been properly explained. Throughout her life Winifred Nicholson was interested in prisms and rainbows, but when she was given some prisms by a physicist friend in the mid 1970s her painting took on a new direction. Looking through a prism she saw objects with a rim of prismatic colour, and explored and developed these ideas, often painting pictures that verged on the abstract. Nicholson's 'prismatic' pictures were a culmination of her life's search to find "form's secret and rhythmic law". She painted them in Greece in 1979, at her home in Cumbria, and during her last painting trip to the Island of Eigg in the Hebrides in 1980, where she had an inspired period of painting and made some of her best loved pictures. Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Liberation of Colour' at mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern art, the book illustrates many previously unseen paintings from private collections, as well as some of Nicholson's best known works, and draws on new research, including previously unseen archival material.

This book explores the career of the St Ives artist Kate Nicholson, daughter of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, from her early landscapes, the still lifes painted in Cumberland and St Ives, the abstracts - many of them inspired by her travels in Greece - to the late works made on the Isle of Eigg in the Hebrides. It examines her artistic relationship with her mother, with whom she painted side by side in Cumberland and Scotland, and on their many Greek travels. It also discusses her creative relationship with her father with whom she lived in St Ives in the mid-1950s for two years, as well as her friendship with many of the St Ives artists and her role in the Penwith Society.

Published to accompany the exhibition 'Kate Nicholson' at Falmouth Art Gallery, this book is the first monograph on this highly talented artist who deserves to be better known. It illustrates many works from both public and private collections and draws on groundbreaking new research, together with the author's experience of travelling with her on painting trips.