Sandra Blow was born in London, where her father was a fruit wholesaler at Spitalfields market. ‘My father didn't know anything about art,’ she said later, ‘but made sure I had a roof over my head and food, so I was free to work.’ As a child she often visited her grandparents' farm, where she enjoyed painting the Kentish orchards.
Sandra studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art from 1941 to 1946, and later at the Royal Academy from 1946 to 1947 and the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome from 1947 to 1948. During the war years she met other painters, like Lucian Freud, at the Gargoyle club, or the Colony Club in Soho, a favourite of Francis Bacon and subject of a famous painting by Michael Andrews.
‘Lucian once took me to the top of a bombed church in Soho,’ she told an interviewer in later life. ‘There were two towers left and he leapt over the gap. “You can't possibly expect me to do that,” I said.
' “Just think of it as if you were on the escalator in Selfridges,” he replied.’
Sandra travelled to Spain and France in the late 1940s, worked in Cornwall for a year from 1957 to 1958. She was the lover of renowned Italian abstract artist Alberto Burri. Sandra taught at the Royal College of Art from 1960 and was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1973. An abstract painter who has also used materials such as cane to construct pictures, she is known for her vivid and powerful paintings and prints.
Sandra Blow’s first experience of the artistic enclave of St Ives was in 1957, when she rented a cottage in Tregerthen, where novelist DH Lawrence had lived during the first world war and many artists had subsequently worked. She was included in the St Ives 1939-64 overview at the Tate Gallery in London in 1985, where she showed alongside artists including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Wilhemina Barnes-Graham. In 1994 Sandra went back to live in St Ives permanently. She died in August 2006.
