Sandra Blow; Pioneering abstract painter
Hyfler/Rosner
23 August 2006
Peter Davies
Sandra Blow, painter and teacher: born London 14 September
1925; Tutor, Painting School, Royal College of Art 1961-75;
ARA 1971, RA 1978; died Truro, Cornwall 22 August 2006.
Her wonderful painting:
http://www.waterman.co.uk/pages/thumbnails/8.html
http://www.lemonstreetgallery.co.uk/artists/indexsandrablow.htm
http://www.originalprints.com/artistview.php?id=788
http://www.adamgallery.com/SandraBlow/OrangeBreakwater.htm
During the 1950s, Sandra Blow was one of the pioneering
abstract painters who introduced into British art a new
expressive informality, using cheap, discarded materials
such as sawdust, sackcloth and plaster alongside the more
familiar material of paint. A tactile as well as visual
emphasis on surface resulted in powerful and complex images,
exuding a rooted earthiness, yet full of mysterious flux and
ambiguity. Later, in response to the optimistic climate of
the 1960s, Blow's palette lightened and for most of the rest
of her career, easily manipulated collage materials, like
torn paper or brightly coloured canvas cut-outs, littered
her often large-scale pictures. The Matisse-inspired
decorative manner of her middle and late periods was a
seamless collaboration between the constructed and the
freely painted.
Sandra Blow was born in London in 1925, the daughter of a
Kent fruit farmer whose orchards supplied retailers in
Covent Garden. She left school at 15 and in 1940 entered St
Martin's School of Art, where she was taken up by Ruskin
Spear, one of the tutors. The patronage of older male
artists like Spear, Carel Weight and Robert Buhler would
remain the pattern throughout her career.
Shortly after the Second World War, Blow studied at the
Royal Academy Schools, but in 1947 ventured further afield
and lived in Italy for a year. She motorcycled around the
countryside, discovering at first hand the architecture and
pre-Renaissance frescos. She took up with another father
figure, the well-known Italian painter Alberto Burri. While
Blow did not produce work of her own in Italy, she learnt a
great deal from the Italian master of "art informel" and
later adapted Burri's manner of composing with sackcloth,
tar and other low-grade materials for her own, perhaps more
naturalistic, ends.
Upon her return to London in 1950, however, Blow began to
assert herself artistically, establishing a calligraphic
style in sensitive landscape drawings and a pronounced
gestural handling of material in the paintings. Her use of
dingy earth pigments like ochre, beige, brown, black and
white to some extent mitigated the explosive and expansive
spatial feeling engendered by splattered and flying paint
marks.
Despite her youth, Blow was at the forefront of the abstract
art movement in Britain during the 1950s. Along with Denis
Bowen, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Gillian Ayres and many
others, she broke down barriers and prejudices, using a
charm and ease of personality to make abstract painting seem
as natural and commonplace as sliced bread. Following her
first painting sale, to Roland Penrose (a founder of the
Institute of Contemporary Arts), Blow's career took off.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, she regularly
exhibited with Gimpel Fils, the leading London gallery whose
association with St Ives artists like Barbara Hepworth, Ben
Nicholson and Peter Lanyon anticipated her move in 1957 to
live for a year in a cottage at Zennor near St Ives. Blow
was widely exhibited abroad throughout this time,
establishing the international profile that her cosmopolitan
outlook warranted. Participation in peripatetic displays of
contemporary British art saw her work promulgated in Italy,
Holland, Germany, the United States and later Australasia.
In 1957 she featured in the first John Moores biannual
exhibition in Liverpool and was included in the Young
Artists Section at the Venice Biennale the following year.
She won the International Guggenheim Award in 1960 and won
second prize at the third John Moores exhibition at the
Walker Art Gallery in 1961.
The influential Zennor-based critic and painter Patrick
Heron offered Blow accommodation at his home, Eagles Nest,
from where she found herself a cottage to rent at nearby
Tregerthen. Originally used by D.H. Lawrence in 1916, this
cottage had a long association with the arts. In an adjacent
cottage used by Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
during the First World War, the talented young painter
Trevor Bell worked; like Blow, Bell enjoyed the
encouragement and patronage of Heron, Roger Hilton and Peter
Lanyon.
Never pedantically descriptive of precise topography, Blow's
pictures like Cornwall (1958) and Space and Matter (1959) -
both of which were prominent in her 2001 retrospective at
Tate St Ives - nevertheless seemed to echo the forms of the
dry-stone walls, granite barns and large foam-spattered
rocks that lay beyond her barn studio.
In 1960, having returned to the capital, Blow acquired a
large studio at Sydney Close in Kensington, where she worked
for the next 24 years. In 1961 she started a 14-year stint
teaching at the RCA, at an auspicious moment when David
Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Ron Kitaj were among the
students. Not a natural communicator and always curiously
non-intellectual, Blow never became a renowned teacher,
although her "studio floor" sessions with younger artists
were masterclasses in the business of making ambitious,
large-scale abstract pictures.
Blow was active socially, entertaining an admiring Francis
Bacon in her studio and mixing with artists like Elisabeth
Frink at the Chelsea Arts Club, of which she was a prominent
member. Blow made canvases that celebrated the mood of the
1960s and beyond, light, open compositions punctuated with
bright, eye-catching colour.
Although painters like Jennifer Durrant, Gillian Ayres and
Joan Mitchell shared with Blow ambitious scale and
expressive dynamism, she stands alone as the earliest and
most original woman painter in Britain able to challenge the
bar-room "macho" cult associated with free, informal
abstract painting.
In moving to St Ives during the mid-1990s, Blow came full
circle, reinvigorating a Cornish art scene bereft of the
glories she had sampled 35 years before. For the first few
years she worked in a beachfront studio at Porthmeor, but
later built a large studio and home at Bullens Court above
the town.
She exhibited locally but also fulfilled her obligations as
a Royal Academician, participating in every Summer
Exhibition at Burlington House, where she enjoyed a
retrospective in 1994 at the newly built Sackler Galleries.
An exhibition to mark Blow's 80th birthday was held at Tate
Britain last year, coinciding with the publication of a
biography, Sandra Blow, by Michael Bird.