Sandra Blow; very different Guardian obit (painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
Abstract painter with an earthy touch, she balanced
geometric shapes with a ferment of organic forms
Michael McNay
Wednesday August 23, 2006
Guardian
Sandra Blow, who has died aged 80, found her direction as a
painter in 1947, when the Italian abstract artist Alberto
Burri became her lover. Burri's life after the war had been
sackcloth and ashes, figuratively because he was a prisoner
of war of the Americans, literally because under those
conditions sackcloth and ashes were the only kinds of
materials available to him to make art with.
In the year during which they lived together in Rome, Burri
remade Blow in his image, but whereas he, with a failing
common to many postwar Italian artists, too often transmuted
his coarse materials into chic artefacts, her work remained
spacious and robust.
Space And Matter, indeed, was the title of the exhibition of
Blow's work that practically filled Tate St Ives in
2001-2002. It is also the name of a painting she made in oil
on board as early as 1959 with an earthy feeling for the
coarseness of wood and tar but that also evokes aerial
elements like wind and flame and sea spray.
She was always liable to work with collage as one element of
her paintings and in early days might stain canvas with tea
as one of her colours. Her later work became relaxed and
colourful.
Two huge paintings of 1988 and 1989, Vivace and Glad Ocean,
each has as its main motif a big shallow V, one crimson, one
blue, which she made by throwing the paint at the canvas: a
method that she might not have thought to use without the
uninhibited example of the American abstract expressionists
in the 40s and 50s, but whose energy she adapted to an open
and joyous lyricism.
She was always, after her student years as a figurative
artist training at St Martin's School of Art in London
(1941-46) and the Royal Academy Schools (1946-47), an
abstractionist. She had the rare ability to make small
works, such as the series of tiny monochrome oils, Waves On
Porthmeor Beach, with a sense of limitless space; and big
works, like the 12 panels constituting Resounding (2001),
which filled a wall at Tate St Ives, as compactly organised
as a small drawing.
Later in life, Blow joined the increasing numbers of artists
who previously would not have been seen, alive or dead, at
Burlington House and who now gladly became Royal
Academicians; but it was the deadly dullness of the academy
schools, as she saw it when she was a student, that drove
her to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.
Her association there with Burri underpinned her work
throughout her life, but he was 10 years older than her and
his influence was overwhelming, so she returned to England
in 1948 to find her own manner. He became an internationally
recognised figure; she remained the better artist.
Blow was born in London, where her father was a fruit
wholesaler at Spitalfields market. As a child she often
visited her grandparents' farm, where she loved to paint the
Kentish orchards, and at the age of 15 her family realised
that art was her thing. So she went to St Martin's and - her
own description - discovered paradise. "My father didn't
know anything about art," she said later, "but made sure I
had a roof over my head and food, so I was free to work."
In truth, it was work and play. "I can't believe how
insouciant we all were," she said. During the war years she
would meet other painters like Lucian Freud and John Minton
at the Mandrake or the Gargoyle club, or at the Colony Club
in Soho, a favourite watering hole of Francis Bacon and the
subject of a famous painting by Michael Andrews.
"Lucian once took me to the top of a bombed church in Soho,"
she told an interviewer in later life. "There were two
towers left and he leapt over the gap. 'You can't possibly
expect me to do that,' I said. 'Just think of it as if you
were on the escalator in Selfridges,' he replied."
It never was easy to make it as a female artist, and in the
50s it wasn't easy to be an abstractionist either. But
Gimpel Fils took on Blow in 1951, gave her regular
exhibitions, and organised her first one-woman show in New
York. Apart from the annual summer show at the Royal
Academy, Blow also exhibited at the Venice Biennale and, in
1961, won second prize at the John Moores Exhibition in
Liverpool. For 14 years from 1961 she was a tutor in the
painting school of the Royal College of Art and was
appointed an honorary fellow.
Her first experience of St Ives was in 1957, when she rented
a cottage in the nearby hamlet of Tregerthen (where DH
Lawrence and Frieda had lived during the first world war and
many artists had subsequently worked). She returned to
London but made working visits to the West Penwith peninsula
often enough to be included in the overview at the Tate
Gallery on Millbank in London in 1985, called St Ives
1939-64. There she showed alongside artists more readily
associated with the area, including Ben Nicholson, Barbara
Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Terry
Frost and Wilhemina Barnes-Graham. In 1994 Blow went back to
live in St Ives permanently, for although famous she could
no longer afford a studio in London.
Blow maintained that events in her personal life often
affected the appearance of her painting, not, of course, in
an illustrational way, but in the tensions and clashes of
the jostling marks on the canvas. But she believed also that
abstract art did not simply reach its own natural if small
audience, but gained some of its validity by feeding back
into the broader visual life of the nation as fashion and
architecture and design.
I bumped into her at a viewing of one of her shows and was
asking her some boring question about how she got from point
A to point B in her painting career when she chipped in to
ask: "Tell me truthfully, is my hat too ridiculous?" She was
never one for theory, or boringness, but she had a keen if
singular sense of her own fashion in dress.
During the 70s she collaborated on a series of paintings
with Eric Defty, an architect from whom she learned the
formal value of geometric shapes. Afterwards, her paintings
often had controlled shapes brushed in against a ferment of
organic forms, and she increasingly used square canvases as
an underpinning architectural statement before making a
single brushstroke.
Waves On Porthmeor Beach, too, was a collaboration, this
time with the poet Alaric Sumner (who died young soon
afterwards), which was both exhibited on gallery walls and
also published as a small book.
Her commitment to the checks and balances of painting as
pure abstraction was total, and though in later life she
sometimes said she wished she had borne children, she
regretfully recognised that she could not have managed a
double life as artist and mother.
John McLean writes: Sandra Blow was the most amazing
colourist and the most original composer of a painting we
have had in recent years. It is a deep shock not only that
this warm and modest person is no longer around, but also
that her stupendous late flowering will not go on. The work
she had been showing in Truro at the Lemon Street Gallery,
and in London at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Cork Street and
the Royal Academy, enthralled me and all the lovers of art I
know.
True colourists are rarer than we think. Sandra could make
hues resonate just as much as, say, Matisse and Miró. And I
felt she should be put on that level before I heard she had
died, so there is nothing sentimental about my assertion.
We know how hard it is to explain what makes a colourist.
Subtlety, of course, comes into it: the fine discrimination
you see in Titian or Veronese. If that is too vague, then a
crucial gift is the ability to modulate colour with such
cunning that a sense of astonishment is part of the joy of
the painting.
You must have noticed, in the midst of all the browns and
greys of, say, Van Dyke's backgrounds, a thrilling
juxtaposition of warm and cold blues. When you go on to see
it recurring in perhaps a small landscape by the
19th-century David Cox, for example, you recognise the
phenomenon as something picked up from Titian: all painting
is in a sense hand-me-down.
Blow, Matisse and Miró use colour with much less tonal
modelling than Titian and his followers. And sometimes with
none at all. They belong more with painters like the Sienese
primitives, or the Indian miniaturists. Their colour is more
obvious, more declamatory, but no less crafty. Let's just
say the true colourist has a secret weapon.
Once when my wife and I were examining one of Sandra's
collages, stuck together with more than usual insouciance, I
remarked with a laugh on the rustic bravura of the
craftsmanship. She turned to ask if I hadn't noticed the
same lack of care and restraint in Sandra's application of
her own eye make-up. Then we agreed that it took nothing
from Sandra's beauty, and the cavalier approach contributed
lots to the loveliness of her paintings.
· Sandra Blow, artist, born September 14 1925; died August
22 2006.