Ben Nicholson - DLWP, Bexhill-on-Sea

On a corridor wall in our new house hangs a print of a red Eiffel Tower by Robert Delaunay. The tower is mangled into fragments of red against a bright blue and white Parisian skyline. The tricolour shines through these contrasts of colour and the viewer is placed into a tangible metropolis. Into a dynamic modern city. Cubism generally has excited me for a long time. Encouraged to follow this style in my GCSE art classes, I developed my own juxtapositions of colour, line, shape and space, happily scumbling acryclics onto sugar paper. Taking the body as my main focus, its movements through the city, I attempted to create statuesque and masculine forms. The style developed into a form of colourful abstraction. Good on the eye if a little soulless. Unlike Delaunay, I did not have direct contact with a city for my inspiration. Weekend trips to London were frowned upon as a result of IRA activity in the 1990s. My home village (a sedate and very well-to-do place in the London commuter belt) was nowhere near to being a Bohemian quarter that aroused the creative juices. Neither did my immediate surroundings - a semi-detached red brick in a post-war working-class housing estate - find a way into my work. The only way to recreate a sense of the cosmopolitan was to trawl the image of sexualised city life depicted in my bibles of 90s living - FHM, Loaded and the slightly more urbane Sky magazines.

Ben Nicholson's exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion proved to me, however, that you could develop a cubist style that reflected both England and the rural periphery. Leading cubists such as Braque, Picasso, Delaunay, Gris and Leger spoke to a different culture, in a different time and place. A life of cafés, clowns, music and furtive cultural exchange. In Nicholson, however, proximity to cosmopolitan life need not direct the subject. He shows that the patchwork of Cumberland countryside and Cornish coast can be reconciled into a Modernist framework without losing connection to the movement's political intent. In paintings like 1940 (St Ives, Version 2 or 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall) (pictured), the café culture seen throughout cubist still life is still there. Yet the cappucino is not the centrepiece. Nicholson looks beyond, to the fishing cottages, moored boats and distant hills from his studio window. Fragmented cups and saucers, a milk jug, coffee or tea pot are foregrounded. But the gaze searches out to life less immediated and movements in the distance, to the geometries inspired by the English coastline. Lighthouses (which were originally styled on the trunk of an English oak tree) and fully-rigged fishing boats heading out from the harbour for a day's catch provide comforting and familiar shapes whose colours leap from the rolling hills that surround.

Nicholson's lesson seems to be that an aesthetic can be directed by careful observation and commitment to technique. He suggests it is possible to find our own style and make it politically relevant in enclaves far away from the seductive speed of the modern city. For someone who has just moved to Bexhill this is an encouraging proposition.