Creativity Quote by Ben Nicholson

Nicholson’s “deeply believe” lands less like a manifesto than a studio ethic: conviction aimed at arrangement, not conquest. Coming from an abstract painter who spent his career negotiating between modernist purity and the stubborn particularity of place, pluralism here isn’t a polite civic slogan. It’s a compositional principle. “Close proximity” is the giveaway. He’s not praising a melting pot where differences dissolve; he’s arguing for adjacency, for keeping distinct logics intact long enough that their friction generates form.

The phrasing “multiple systems” carries the voice of an artist who lived through the era when isms behaved like rival parties: Constructivism, Surrealism, abstraction, figuration, craft tradition. Nicholson refuses the demand to pick a single faith. The addition of “agnostic systems” sharpens the point: not just competing doctrines, but modes of working that resist doctrine altogether. That’s a sly rebuke to modernism’s tendency to turn aesthetic preference into moral law.

Context matters. Nicholson moved through interwar and postwar Britain, a cultural scene anxious about continental influence while also hungry for it. His pluralism reads as a defense of permeability: the right of an artist (and a culture) to borrow, adapt, and coexist with contradictions without calling it indecision. Subtext: purity is a dead end; vitality comes from neighbors. In Nicholson’s world, the future isn’t a single style winning. It’s a crowded room where different systems remain audible, and the work emerges from how carefully you place them side by side.