Aug 63 (metallic)

In a letter to his old friend Adrian Stokes, written on 5 June 1967, Nicholson discusses the physically demanding process of carving the reliefs of this period, 'The technique is the same old technique of that first relief (which you predicted) except the material I experimented with then was softer & thicker & this meant a possibilty of a deeper circle & other depths, and being very soft it was much easier to carve (but also more vulnerable in fact v. vulnerable at the corners). The new material is a universal building material which comes from Sweden and Finland - it is very hard & unless reinforced is brittle. It is not pleasant to carve like wood bec. it's a 'dead' material but one becomes so keen on one's idea that the dead material quickly becomes alive ... Occasionally to get an extra thickness I get my frame maker to glue an extra piece on also I automatically have a double thickness. The cutting I do with a chisel (the material is very hard almost bonehard & at first you think you can't cut it with a chisel but I like the hard physical work bec. it's all towards an end & I become more and more identfied with my material - so that it boils down to THOUGHT & people find physical things so easy to understand & 'thought' so difficult that I don't much talk about technique. There's nothing mysterious about it except that few artists make reliefs' (see J. Lewison, exhibition catalogue, Ben Nicholson, London, Tate Gallery, 1993, pp. 92, 93).

We are very grateful to Sir Alan Bowness, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.