Sandra Blow Scion of the St Ives Set and First Woman to Blaze the Trail of Abstract Art

When looking at an artwork by Sandra Blow the viewer will experience an emotional reaction.  Her work can be meditative, sensual, uplifting. For many of us it will feel strange to have such a reaction to a picture that contains no figurative subject matter. We doubt our own reactions; assuming that abstract art must be difficult to relate to, or that it is simplistic twaddle with no meaning.

In fact Blow’s work is full of meaning. She is an artists’ artist, an academic artist, but this does not mean that her work is pretentious or too intellectual for us mere mortals to understand. It is actually because the work is wholly abstract that it becomes universal: every individual reacts to it in their own way, can take a feeling or a meaning from it that applies to them, can see whatever they like in it; it is at once highly personal and universally applicable. Abstract art can communicate before it is understood.

She is viewed as an academic painter because she focused herself primarily within the self-contained problems of ‘pure’ painting: balance and proportion, tensions, scale. Her work demands to be viewed in terms of its formal qualities rather than in terms of biographical revelation or social comment.Abstraction meant for Blow a source of vitality, risk and surprise that is a close as you can get to the artist’s own sense of being alive,

‘For me, as well as the natural interactions of colour and line, there is a biological factor in a painting in which all the parts contribute to the functional whole, as our bodies do. When it ‘lives’ in that way it is finished. In addition, there is a God-sent gift, a balance of magic.’

Her silkscreen prints often include collaged elements, which are a reference to her use of discarded materials in her original paintings. Blow would use cheap everyday materials such as sawdust, sack-cloth, ripped canvas, sand, ash and plaster to add textures and dynamism to her work. She was influenced in this technique by Alberto Burri (whom she met in 1947 and with whom she travelled around Italy) who may have started using such materials when he was in P.O.W camp and therefore unable to have access to ‘normal’ art materials. The use of such materials lends Blow’s work an expressive informality, and shows her belief in the importance of a tactile as well as a visual emphasis to the picture surface. She was 22 when she met Burri, ten years her senior, as they travelled and painted he introduced her to the subject of abstraction, debating with her the relationship of forms and spaces in Renaissance paintings, which clearly had resonances in the world of abstract art.

Her style moved from sombre earthy tonal works in the 50s/60s to the more spontaneous minimal geometric and colourful works of the 80s onwards. She held together the visual energy of her compositions with points and accents of sharper colour, ‘Like achieving a perfect note in music, you hammer away at it, and when you finally get it, it seems so simple’. The Matisse-inspired decorative manner of her middle and late periods was a seamless collaboration between the constructed and the freely painted. What one must keep in mind when looking at her work is that they are not, as they might appear, the inspiration of a moment, but the result of painstaking experimentation. Blow temporarily stapled pieces of coloured paper or other material to canvas, woodboard or paper, and altered positions, shapes and colours until the final overall composition of a picture suggested itself

Blow never wanted to work to a specific theme or become engaged in a series of works that were related to each other; she approached every canvas as a totally new challenge, a new idea, a new experience. She maintained that events in her personal life often affected the appearance of her painting, not, of course, in an illustrational way, but in the tensions and clashes of the jostling marks on the canvas. But she believed also that abstract art did not simply reach its own natural audience, but gained some of its validity by feeding back into the broader visual life of the nation as fashion and architecture and design.

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