Blow, Sandra
Sandra Blow was born in London in 1925. She did well at school and at the age of 10 she thought of a creative career of a writer but took up drawing later. On the advice of her aunt, Sandra enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art in September 1941, a few days after her sixteenth birthday. She greatly enjoyed her five years at the school where her life drawings became distinguished by latent vitality of the static poses and her most encouraging influence was Ruskin Spear (1911-1990). Sandra learned from him how to apply oil paint by building it up in delicate layers associated with William Coldstream (1908-1987) and other Euston Road School artists. When Blow decided to become an abstract artist a few years later Spear told her, ’Britain has lost its best portrait painter’.
After finishing their day in the studio of St Martin’s in Soho, Sandra and her friends would stay on dancing in the clubs like Gargoyle in Meard Street where she got to know John Minton (1917-1957) and Lucien Freud (1922-2011) among the others.
In December 1946 Sandra took the next step the art school system offered started a course at the newly opened Royal Academy Schools. Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) the president of the Royal Academy, known for his paintings of horse races, used his position to rail against Modernism. The students were encouraged to spend very considerable time accurately copying and to study the actual methods of the Classical masters, and Sandra found this complete absence of the personal development off-putting. She went to Rome via Paris and Florence in summer 1947 where she met Nicholas Carone who studied under Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in New York and introduced Sandra to his teachings around the time when Hofmann was being hailed as the founding father of American Abstract Expressionism by Clement Greenberg. She developed her interest in abstract art which was further strengthened by the meeting with Alberto Burri (1915-1995) who had begun his experiment with abstract art too. Their relationship was her ‘first real affair’ but ‘the fundamental bond was work’. They visited other parts of Italy enjoying and studying the works of Renaissance art like Giotto (1266-1337), Masaccio (1401-1428), Fra Angelico (1395-1455), Piero Della Francesca ( d.1492) and Sandra learned from Burri by observation and from his aura of single-mindedness. She returned to London in September 1948 and resolved not to return to the Academy and to embark on her career as an artist.
During the next three years, Blow travelled to Spain and France where she met Joan Miró ( 1893-1983), Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) and Graham Sutherland (1903-1980). In 1950 Sutherland agreed to come to her studio and give his opinion which was laconic but decisive: ‘Carry on, it’s all right’. When she returned to London that year she devoted the rest of her life to abstract art.
Blow rise to public attention started in 1951 when she began her collaboration with Gimple Fils who took her on there and then. In March the same year with the help of Burri and his friend the sculptor and painter Ettore Colla (1896-1968) she exhibited at his Galleria Origine in Rome alongside with Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) and Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) which linked her to European Art Informel.
In May 1952 Sandra featured in a mixed show in Oxford together with Peter Lanyon (1918-1964), Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) and William Gear ( 1915-1997) which catalogue mentioned that Blow ‘although the youngest of the group –already occupies an important position in the development of the new British abstract movement’.
Through Gimpel Fils, she met Roger Hilton (1911-1975) at his solo show in 1952 who became a friend but not a lover and their friendship was the second, after Burri, formative personal influence on her art.
In March 1956 Blow exhibited with Alan Davie (1920-2014), Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955) and Hans Hartung (1904-1989) at Galeria Bignou in Paris and the Tate Gallery later that year where she showed ‘Winter’ landscape bought by the MOMA in New York.
She also started to incorporate plaster and, following Burri, sacchi, sackcloth fabric, into her paintings integrating them into the areas of colour.
By the late 1950s, Blow had met leading Abstract Expressionists in New York and encountered their work at the 1958 Venice Biennale. However, their extrovert and impulsive art felt alien to her own approach which was ‘the opposite of someone like De Kooning’ in her own words. Blow’s abstract art is about bringing emotions into the painting and not expressing them through it and her landscapes are subconsciously appealing to that gold standard of British painterly aesthetics set by William Turner (1775-1851) in proto-abstract paintings by his instinctive mastery of atmospheric space.
Sandra joined the staff of the Royal College of Art as a Visiting Tutor In February in February 1960 where David Hockney (b.1937) and R.B. Kitaj ( 1932-2007) were among the students. The latter commented later ’I was always impressed by Blow’s abstract picture’. She had several solo shows at Gimpel Fils in 1960 and 1962 and New Art Centre in 1966 and 1968. Her paintings were regularly included by the Art Council and the British Council in touring shows in Britain and abroad and she produced a series of her ‘Tea and Ash’ paintings using the tea wash and rubbed ash as well as turning to the Minimalist approach later.
Blow was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1971 and a full Royal Academician in 1978 which was a sign of the acknowledgement of her life-long achievements. It was a decade when Sandra had some health problems but experimented with PVC and collages and worked with Polaroid as well as her large-scale paintings. Two other famous women-artists received professional recognition in the 1970s: Bridget Riley (b.1931) had a one-person show at the Hayward Gallery bin 1971 and Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993) became a BE in 1976.
Notwithstanding her status Blow continued to work prolifically during the last 30 years of her life and her works were regularly acquired by major public museums like Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts Council and many others. She had a retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1994 and another one at Tate St Ives in 2001.
