Mary Nicol Neill Armour 1902-2000

Born in 1902 in Blantyre, Mary Nicol Steel shared an appreciation and love of flowers with her father, which would be a signature subject of her artistry. She attended the Hamilton Academy under the instruction of Penelope Beaton and studied at the Glasgow School of Art (1920-1925) with Maurice Greiffenhagen and David Forrester Wilson. Throughout these years she cultivated a talent for depicting landscapes, flowers and still-lives and for defiantly developing her own style, maintaining an ingenuity and independent spirit which instils her work with creative integrity. This defiance probably cost her First Prize for painting at GSA in 1925, but won her a husband, William Armour a fellow student who she married in 1927. Her early style incorporated a rich use of paint textures leading to an adventurous use of colour in her later works, and always maintaining an expressionist quality, which derives from the Colourist influences. She was the second woman, after Anne Redpath in 1952, to be elected into the RSA in 1958 and between the years 1951 and 1962 she lectured still life at the Glasgow School of Art. Her work bridges the past styles and the end of the Glasgow era with the future expressionism of the Colourists, leading her later work to be the most vital and colourful of her works. The deterioration of her eyesight led to the end of her painting in 1988 but her vigorous and characteristic painting style lived on in her straight talking and outspoken personality until her death.