Sandra Blow 1925-2006
Plaster and Sacking, 1956
oil, plaster and sacking on hardboard
41 x 35 ins
signed and dated verso 'Blow 56'

Provenance
The Artist

Exhibited
London, British Painting 1952-1977, Royal Academy of Arts, 1977, cat no.45 illustrated



Though trained at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, the crucial event in Sandra Blow’s artistic education was the decision, taken when she was still in her early twenties, to continue her studies in Italy. Arriving in the post-war turmoil of 1946, she soon formed close friendships with two artists in particular: Nicholas Carone, a pupil of the great German abstract painter Hans Hofmann, from whom, as she later observed, she really learnt the elements of painting, and Alberto Burri, an artist with an already established reputation in European avant-garde art. Burri’s paintings - large-scale expressive abstracts - incorporated, in the same vein as Tapies, Dubuffet and others, a variety of rough materials into their painted surface such as earth, ash, cement and charred sacking. His example had a powerful effect on the direction Blow’s own work took when she finally returned to England c.1950, as is clearly evident in the use of plaster and sacking in this powerful painting. Painted in 1956, it came at a time when Blow’s reputation was already very much in the ascendant in this country. On her return from Italy her work had quickly achieved wide-ranging public and critical recognition with solo shows in New York in 1956, and paintings being bought by the New York Museum of Modern Art as well as the Tate and Arts Council in London. It came, too, at a moment when American Abstract Expressionism was beginning to make its first full impact in England and something in the spontaneity and weight of Plaster and Sacking (compared even to Burri) suggests that Blow had already absorbed, at first hand, some of its lessons into her own art.