#barbararae

As the world celebrates International Women's Day we are taking a look at some of our most influential and inspiring female artists, SANDRA BLOW, LUCY FARLEY and BARBARA RAE.

SANDRA BLOW

One of the leading lights of the abstract art movement of the 1950s. Her works are often on a large scale, consisting of abstract collages of cheap discarded materials such as sawdust, cut-out strips of old canvas, plaster and torn paper.

Although painters like Jennifer Durrant, Gillian Ayres and Joan Mitchell shared with Blow ambitious scale and expressive dynamism, she stands alone as the earliest and most original woman painter in Britain able to challenge the bar-room "macho" cult associated with free, informal abstract painting.

See more of Sandra Blow’s work here.

Red Melange

2006

LUCY FARLEY

Born in 1982, Lucy lives and works in London. She studied at Central St. Martins graduating in 2005 before completing her MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2009. Having completed a two-year Fellowship at the Royal Academy, she has exhibited several times at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition as well as at the Mall Galleries.

"It is important I work in situ on Printmaking plates, paper and drafting film, directly from the landscape, figure or interior. There is a speed and spontaneity I wish to capture in my original drawings which I can manipulate, but always keep in the finished works."

See more of Lucy Farley’s work here.

L'ecluse, Ile de Ré

2016

BARBARA RAE

Barbara Rae CBE RA studied at the Edinburgh College of Art from 1961 to 1965. She was awarded a travel scholarship in 1966 which enabled her to work in France and Spain and unleased a love of travel that still remains a huge influence in her work. She went on to have a teaching career in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow, and now lives and works in Edinburgh.

Taking her inspiration from maps, geography, typography and local history, Rae’s dynamic and colourful paintings combine the influence of landscape and travel with painterly abstraction. Although she does not like the term landscape painter, the importance of place is very apparent in her works; in particular the human traces and patterns of history that are left on a landscape.

See more of Barbara Rae’s work here.

Winter Almonds