FLAVIA IRWIN RA (1916 - 2009)

This was William Packer's review of our large Sandra Blow and Flavia Irwin exhibition at Galerie Valerie Knightsbridge in November 1997. The location was chosen because Flavia, and her late husband, Sir Roger de Grey, then President of the Royal Academy,had selected all the artists for our first Galerie Valerie show in April 1992.

'In chasing after youth and novelty,we neglect long experience and real achievement to our cost...Irwin and Blow are two senior artists whose innate distinction is manifestin everything they make and show. And what makes their work all the more remarkable is that it has to it,as Basil Bunting would have it in a musical context,"never a crabbed turn or congested cadence, never a boast or a see-here."
There is ever a natural, disinterested humility in the true artist's concern in getting the work right that is quite at odds with any facile preoccupation with supposed "originality" or "cutting-edge".

Both painters are abstract,or at least much abstracted in the final image - but then it has always been arguable that there is no such thing as a truly abstract painting, which must always have a pictorial space to it,and light and form.
Both artists here draw directly upon nature for their references to a more or less obvious degree.
For Flavia,the interest has long been organic, botanical, looking to the natural rhythms of growth and flow as though peering down into a pool or undergrowth.
Lately however, her attention has turned somewhat to the heavens, taking on a more cosmic aspect,though still as it were inspecting the world as through a glass.

Sandra, her sensibility steeped over so many years
in the space,light and shifting moods of the landscape of far-west Cornwall, has a broader, more open scope to her reference, redolent of ancient field patterns, rock strata, the sweep of the sky and the underlying strength of the land.
The two are...so very different in their work and yet wonderfully complementary,the one close, intimate and restrained,the other expansive and direct,yet applying the soundest of principles and painterly instincts with the lightest touch.
How well they go together.
William Packer,London, October 1997

Curriculum vitae:
Flavia Irwin studied under Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland at Chelsea School of Art and at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. She taught general design at Medway College of Art from 1970 to 1975 and was Senior Tutor of Decorative Arts at City and Guilds of London Art School from 1975 until 1997. Irwin’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the UK, regularly in the Royal Academy
Summer Exhibitions since the early 1980s and at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. Irwin was elected Senior Academician in 1996 and is an Honorary Member of the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. She lives and works in Kent.Her work is in many private collections in the UK and the USA. Other:Chelsea and Westminster Hospital; Government Art Collection London; Westminster Conference Centre London; Midland Montague Morgan Grenfell; Carlisle City Art Gallery; Walker Art Gallery Liverpool; Department of the Environment;

Paintings