"I am the proud and appreciative possessor of Summer Seascape, 1998 and Spotty Mug on Black and Green 2001. Each is typical of Rachel Nicholson's later work. I find an amazing simplicity and tranquillity in both. They hang in different rooms in our house in the Berkshire countryside. We are far from the sea yet all of us who use the house feel very connected to it. Her inescapably St Ives Summer Seascape is a kind of still life of this sublime spot in which light gathers to provide that very special uplift that characterises St Ives. I only get to the house at irregular weekends but Rachel Nicholson's powerful simplicity is one of the key aesthetic signals that I am back home again."
Jon Snow
Newscaster, Channel 4 News
"Rachel Nicholson creates a backwater of calm in the hurly-burly of the twenty-first century. Her work memorialises the enduring artists legacy of an Edwardian grandfather, modernist parents, and a childhood in St Ives, a town to which she has frequently returned. Her roots are permanently present. Her shadowless paintings are cut off from the anxieties of present day conflicts and celebrate the safe haven of tea time by the sea. How we all long for that!"
Jeremy Lewison
Art Historian
"Although Nicholson received no formal art education and little encouragement at home, her upbringing in an artistic milieu in which both parents worked professionally helped to train her eye by example. Her concerns were and remain those of the early British modernists; her devotion to still life and landscape. her formal interests in composition geometry in rhythmic line, pattern, and the value of colour, and her belief in the fresh, untrained, or naive eye. Her search, as she says, 'for some sort of perfection, for a balance or harmony in my work' reflects the ideals of a generation which inspired her own ideas. the close connection between still life and landscape substantiates this aim. It lies at the heart of her work, and distinguishes a consistent and personal vision, which she continues to expand and refine."
Judith Bumpus
Art Historian
"For art had set in order sense / And feeling and intelligence, / And from its ideal order few / Our local understanding too."
Katherine Smalley
Allied Capital Corporation