Sandra Blow 1925-2006
Composition, 1960
oil on board
54 by 48 inches
signed and inscribed verso

Provenance
The artist

Exhibited
Malta, Contemporary British Painting, Arts Council exhibition, 1965, cat no.1
touring to Yugoslavia etc.



In 1957 Sandra Blow went to live and work for a year in Cornwall, renting the same cottage at Zennor that D. H. Lawrence had taken during the First World War. Painting in a nearby barn and, weather permitting, using its outside as her easel, the effect of working out of doors seems to have had an unmistakable impact on the direction her work now took. Light, weather and landscape as well as grit, sand and other matter were to become the vital ingredients of paintings such as Cornwall, a work coincidentally painted in the same year that Blow represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. Also significant for her work of this date was the close presence of Roger Hilton, who had come to live and work permanently in the Penwith peninsula at much the same time. Hilton was much admired by Blow and became a close friend and often fearsome critic (he was that to everyone at some point), and something of the ferocity and directness of his painting is evident here.