Sandra Blow (14 September 1925 – 22 August 2006) 

 

Sandra Blow was born in London,  and studied at Saint Martins School of Art from 1941 to 1946, at the Royal Academy Schools from 1946 to 1947, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome from 1947 to 1948. She travelled to Spain and France in the late 1940s, worked in Cornwall for a year from 1957 to 1958 and went on to teach at the Royal College of Art from 1960.

She was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1973, and later lived and worked in Cornwall.

An abstract painter who has also used materials such as polyethylene, and willow cane to construct pictures, Blow was concerned pre-eminently with the problems of pure painting: balance and proportion, tension and scale.

She is an artist of extraordinary skill and insight.  Sandra Blow was the most amazing colourist and the most original composer of a painting we have had in recent years.Her work has 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. 

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.