Sandra Blow b.1925

Following her student years at St Martin's and the Royal Academy Schools, Sandra Blow spent a formative year living in Italy. While there she formed a close friendship with Alberto Burri whose large-scale abstract painting was to have a major impact on the direction of her own work. His incorporation of non-artistic materials such as earth, ash, cement and sacking into the painted surface immediately appealed to Blow's highly developed feeling for texture and colour. She returned to London in 1949 to assimilate what she had learned and forge her own artistic language adapting Burri's use of unconventional 'found' materials to her own vigorous and very individual end.