Kathleen 'Jim' Hudson; Painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Merryl Cook
Monday June 19, 2006
The Guardian
Kathleen "Jim" Hudson, who has died aged 99, nicknamed
because her parents wanted a boy, was a fabulous woman. Her
near century of life deserves celebration. A talented
painter, at 90 she swapped bestselling landscapes and still
lifes for abstracts. Her plantswoman's garden was renowned.
With a sapphire-blue gaze and enigmatic smile, she welcomed
men, women and children warmly and waved goodbye serenely.
Brought up to play the cello politely and dispense tiny
sandwiches at tea, she was pitchforked into a harsh war.
While her well-heeled husband was with the icy North
Atlantic convoys, Jim taught, made clothes and made do. She
brought up two sons, one adopted, outstandingly. Liam
(obituary, March 17 2005) was a psychologist and Sean worked
in photography.
After the war, at her home in Surrey, Jim instigated a sort
of Carshalton Beeches salon for hordes of her sons'
university acquaintances, who camped in her garden at
weekends, painting pictures, discussing life and literature,
playing the flute or guitar, making Irish coffee on the
hearthrug. There were expeditions to Hampstead Heath to
listen to the dawn chorus, then back to huge breakfasts of
homemade muesli. Jim conjured wonderful meals, paid for from
her wages as a schoolteacher. The salon hatched some
illustrious names.
When she was 50-something, Jim's husband decamped."I'm so
looking forward to my new life," she said, leaving her
designer house for a dilapidated Tudor cottage near Crawley
Down, east Sussex. She furnished it with delicious
inappropriateness - discards from the marital home, white
cubic coffee-tables, over-sized metal lampshades, Heals'
remnants in giant, arty prints.
She dug a garden, planted quince by the well and collected
black plants. Gardening societies admired, photos galore
were published. A Dutch visitor peered into the cottage
exclaiming, "Look! Not a cliche in sight, and Kaffe Fassett
on the sofa!"
Jim painted every day, palette-knife still life, panoramas
of cooling towers, the Thames barrage. She taught women's
groups at the cottage until the husbands protested - and
came to paint in the evenings. Exhibitions of her own and
students' work sold out.
Her constitution was phenomenal, fuelled by lashings of
cream, steak-and-kidney and fish-and-chips. She always
dressed elegantly, usually in pure silk (from charity
shops), holding court in old age from an armchair draped to
match her floaty scarves, a living Matisse. Grief came with
the deaths of both her sons. At 99, she was semi-paralysed
by stroke. She would not have cared a jot for the Queen's
congratulations, missed by a whisker. The void is
unfillable.