Vanessa Bell has seduced me. She has offered nothing fancier than bottles and a bowl, by a window that looks out on terracotta roofs and wooded hills. The frame of the window runs just inside the frame of the painting, squeezing the table and its contents into a narrow strip. The stout blue flask is clear as a Cornish sky in May, the delicate stoppered bottle the colour of a midsummer sea. Beyond the claustrophobia of the room lie buildings licked with all the rich red pinks of a rose garden.
She was aptly named, Bell. At her best, her colours ring with clarity – chiming one against the other yet held distinct. She luxuriates in it, but the spaces she conjures are lived. This is not a mere still life, but a space for bodies, a home. For all its tonal richness the constraints of the interior space also delineate Bell’s position: a young mother, gazing through the window into a world through which she cannot move with freedom.
