Gillian Ayres

Abstract artist who cared about the look, not any ‘meaning’

Gillian Ayres CBE RA, artist. Born: 3 February 1930, Barnes, London. Died: 11 April 2018, North Devon, aged 88.

Gillian Ayres, a leading British abstract painter whose pursuit of beauty led her to use evocative colours, texture her works with thick layers of oils and occasionally hurl paint at her canvasses, has died. Her son, Sam Mundy, said the cause was heart and kidney failure.

“Painting is a visual, silent medium, but I love it and I am obsessed by it,” Ayres told the Guardian in 2001.

Ayres was besotted by paint – what it felt like physically and what she could do with it. She used her hands, brushes, parts of cardboard boxes and brooms to arrange the vivid images that distinguished her work for more than 60 years. She often spent more time staring at a work-in-progress to determine how to organise shapes and space than she did painting it.

In an interview three years ago she recalled how, as a younger artist, she routinely painted all night. “I used to go a bit potty,” she said. “It was almost like I couldn’t stop. That doesn’t happen now, but I still need the whole day. I don’t need a dental appointment or any other ruddy appointment interrupting!”

In her later years she risked her safety to climb a ladder, her hands filled with gobs of paint, ready for a workout with a giant canvas. She did not discuss the meanings, if any, in her works. She insisted she only thought about the shapes, the space and the colours. “People like to understand and I wish they wouldn’t,” she said in 2015. “I wish they’d just look. It’s visual.”

Gillian Ayres was born in 1930. Her father was a partowner of a hat factory whose customers included the Army. Her mother, Florence, was a housewife. For a while she attended school in an air-raid shelter in London.

When she was attending a girls’ school in 1943, books on van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Monet inspired her to paint. At 16 she insisted on attending art school and was admitted to what is now the Camberwell College of Arts in London. Chafing at the rigidity of the teaching, she left shortly before taking the final exam. She got a job as a hotel chambermaid in Paris, then returned to London to work in an art gallery with Henry Mundy, a painter she met at Camberwell. They wed in 1951 and divorced 25 years later.

By the mid-1950s she was a rising abstract painter, splattering paint on a floor canvas like Jackson Pollock. “The whole idea of the canvas as an area in which to act, an area and what one does with it – I wanted to find out about that, obsessively,” she said in 2010.

Ayres came of age in Britain with abstract artists like Howard Hodgkin and Victor Pasmore. Ayres made her journey into abstract art in Britain as, perhaps, the only woman among men. “Nobody else was doing anything as adventurous or uninhibited, like throwing paint at the canvas, which only had parallels in America,”

Alan Cristea, whose London gallery represents Ayres, said. “She refused to be classified as a woman artist; she thought that was silly.” Yet, he added: “She became sort of a role model for women of the younger generation.”

Her work has been widely exhibited in Europe and when she had a show at the Knoedler Gallery in Manhattan in 1985, John Russell, a critic for the New York Times, praised her as a “full-bodied, adventurous and uncompromising painter.” He later wrote, “Pushing the medium to its limits, she communicates a kind of reckless radiance that comes across in paintings large and small, square or round.”

She also taught at St Martin’s School of Art in London and the Winchester School of Art in Hampshire, where she was head of painting.

Mark Hudson, an art critic for the Telegraph, and former student of Ayres, recalled in an article last Friday how influential she had been. “Within months of her arrival a substantial number had stopped painting aimless landscapes and started producing largescale, gestural, Ayresesque abstracts – a development that had more to do with Ayres’s force of personality than any kind of systematic instruction,” he wrote.

In addition to Sam, Ayres is survived by another son, Jim Mundy, and a granddaughter. She continued to live with her former husband for most of the years after their divorce.

Ayres stopped painting about a year ago as illness kept her out of her studio.

“I always knew in my heart of hearts that the day she couldn’t paint she wouldn’t live very long,” Sam Mundy, also an abstract artist, said. “I’m surprised she lasted a year not painting.” New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.

LEGACY “She refused to be classified as a woman artist; she thought that silly – but she became a role model for younger women”