NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

ARTISTS’ LIVES

Sandra Blow

Interviewed by Andrew Lambirth

C466/42

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C466/42/01-07 Playback no: F5201-F5207

Collection title: Artists’ Lives

Interviewee’s surname: Blow Title:

Interviewee’s forename: Sandra Sex: Female

Occupation: Date and place of birth: 14.9.1925

Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation:

Dates of recording: 10.7.1996

Location of interview: British Library, London

Name of interviewer: Andrew Lambirth

Type of recorder: Marantz CP430 Type of tape: TDK C60

Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: N/A

Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: Original

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: © British Library

Interviewer’s comments:

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 1 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A

[Sandra Blow talking to Andrew Lambirth on the 10th of July 1996.]

Sandra, we have to begin at the beginning. Can you say where and when you were born?

I was born in London in, I'm afraid, 1925.

What was the day?

It was the 14th of September.

Whereabouts in London?

I think it was in Amhurst Park, which is sort of Stoke Newington, north London, in that area.

Did you grow up there?

I did, I went to school in Northwold Road primary school, or council school I think it was called.

And what sort of a house was it that you...?

I can't remember the house I was born in because I think we moved from it fairly soon. And, oh the other house, all I can remember is the height of the table, which must have been about, just above my head. And my father's legs I can remember, because they too always seemed to be rather high up.

Was this in the living-room or the kitchen or...?

I've no idea. I just remember things being above me and the height of my father's legs, so I was probably about two, my earliest memories, two or three.

Did you stay in that house for long or did you move again?

No, we moved to another house in Stamford Hill, which I can remember, and I think there's a photograph of it, which is a sort of five-storeys house I think, quite a large Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 2 house, which had an attic and a basement and a large garden which I used to enjoy rather, and a front garden too.

Did you play in the garden much?

Well we played in the back garden. My brother was sixteen months older than I am, and so we were quite close to each other's age, and we did play in the back garden quite a lot, not the front garden.

What's his name?

Stanley, Stanley Blow.

And did you get on well with him?

Well not as...I liked him very much; I don't think he was all that keen on me, but he...we did play together, and once he locked me in a trunk which was rather terrifying, in the attic that was. But, yes I liked him, yes.

And what sort of a background was it, I mean would you call it an artistic background?

No it wasn't. My family are Jewish and we came over, I think my great-grandparents, in the end of the 19th century, 1880 or 1890, and they went a kind of traditional route at that time which was first to the East End of London, and my great-grandfather had a stand in Spitalfields Market and both my grandfather and my father, it was called M. Blow, and they both worked there, or that was where they... And then my...because then we got a lot of fruit from Kent, they frequently went to Kent to, I think they purchased a crop; to safeguard the farmer would quite often, he would sell part of the crop before it came into fruition, so there were lots of visits to Kent. And eventually my grandfather bought a farm in Paddock Wood, which was a fruit farm, and my loveliest memories of my childhood were that farm and the orchards and the meadows of that farm.

Did you go down and spend time there?

Yes, because my father was very devoted to his parents, and they went to live there in 1922, before I was born, and we would go really I think almost every weekend, Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 3 probably on Sundays, and spend the day there, from London Bridge and go to, you could get off at Paddock Wood, and there was a stile and a lane that you walked, or a path which led to the farm, about two miles away, or a mile away.

What was the crop?

Apples.

Apples?

There were some plums I think, but mostly apples, of various sorts. And at that time I don't think they were as popular as now but I think we had some Worcesters, but there were different orchards with different apples.

In the old-fashioned traditions?

Yes, and the farm had different names, like Tom's Hut Field, and the Ten Acre and those sort of names which... And they had lovely ditches and hedges between the farms which were enchanting, they were beautiful things.

I seem to remember that they used to grow cherries sort of in Kent and so on.

There were, yes, but we didn't have cherry orchards, but yes, cherries were grown there. And also, it was a hop district; we were quite near Whitbread's, Beltring, the great hop farms, and the hoppers would come down and they would, in a field quite near us were hop-pickers' huts, so you saw quite a bit of the hoppers when they were... I once went hop-picking during the war actually, but I didn't work as a child.

Was that quite wild?

Well, it was hard work, and, yes, there were strange sort of, you know, they would come down from East London, and it was...they did seem awfully dirty, I don't know, but obviously they didn't have baths or water so you couldn't but help, you know, not... Anyway, but they enjoyed themselves as... They were only part of the year they were there. I think the people whom I was most impressed with were the farm workers and the lorry drivers on our farm, and I loved them, and they were very nice people. And also one of the people I really loved was Bessie Wootten, W-O-O-T-T- Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 4 E-N, which I think... Anyway, she was our maid and she joined us when she was 14, and so all the time I grew up she was there.

Was this in London or...?

No, this is in Paddock Wood.

Right.

And, she did everything. She was a wonderful woman, she was so efficient and clean, but she was immensely nice and she would play with us, and we had lots of games and laughs. But she was very lovable. And the house was crammed with grandchildren so quite often we shared, there were two beds in her room, and a cot, and I think, I often shared a room with her, and I loved her very much, Bessie Wootten. I can remember her voice sort of, yes.

Do you remember particular toys that you had?

I had a...my father used to read Rupert stories to me when I went to bed, and he...I had a bear which I think I called Rupert. And I think, vaguely think, I had a doll's house. I do remember one game I did play which was a grocery set, it pretended to be a shop with little objects, and I remember with my mother asking her to buy things from the shop, and it all seemed very thrilling in some curious way, when she would ask for something and I would then give her the thing. But it did seem very real.

I remember doing that kind of thing.

Do you?

Yes. So, how much...I mean you would have spent weekends in Paddock Wood, or a day?

Well mostly it was...we would go down on Sunday, and catch the morning train, which were wonderful those trains in those days. And they had white things behind your head and very beautiful wood and the cushions were lovely. And it was a steam train I think as well, so...

Travelling with a certain degree of style? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 5

Yes, yes. I always enjoyed it. And also there was a man who had a little chocolate and newspaper shop near London Bridge, and we would, my father would buy Terry's All Gold chocolates, an enormous treat just...

Did he drive a car, your father?

No, he never drove. There were cars down on the farm but my father didn't drive. And he used to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning and go to Spitalfields. I think when he was a little boy he sold lemons in the streets or from Spitalfields at about 5 in the morning, he used to get up and...and he had great freedom as a child, and I think he used to go to the London music halls in the East End or wherever when he was quite young.

So, was he quite comfortably off by the time you were around?

I think so, I always had the sense we were wealthy; well we wouldn't have been wealthy, but, I did have a sense we lived rather well, perhaps compared to the hoppers, I don't know. And also the farm was spotlessly clean, because Bessie was such a marvellous, she kept...she ironed and she washed and she swept, but she was unendingly busy and energetic, so, it all seemed very fresh and lovely.

Did you have sort of a nurse or someone in London?

No, we had endless charwomen, well people who would come in and help clean, but I didn't have a particular nurse. I think I had a nurse, oh I can't remember, when I was a baby, called Nurse Wright, but there are dreadful photographs of her and I'm sure that it was too, Nurse Too Right I think really. [LAUGHS] But one of, some of the early memories of the farm in Paddock Wood, those are the sort of really lovely memories of my childhood which were...oh in the lambing season we had lambs, sheep and horses then, and some of the lambs were brought in to the kitchen, Mr Dunster the shepherd who looked after, or the man who looked after the lambs, he would bring them into the fire in the kitchen, which was one of those old grates with sort of...and there we would feed the lambs with bottles of milk and...strange. And it had a lovely pond, there were beautiful ponds in the gardens then in Kent with high grasses and lovely things growing, it was enchanting. And so, the one more memory which is the silence, I've never heard it since. It was so quiet there, extraordinary, at night it was very dark and it was...if people were walking you would hear from a very long way Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 6 off the sound of their footsteps coming closer. And that's gone, I don't know where that's gone, that sound, that quietness, but now with the trains and the aeroplanes and the motor cars and so on...

Did you go down sort of every weekend all through the year?

I think, well it was pretty regular, because I think it was his pleasure to go, get out of London too. We certainly went, you know... I think, I don't exactly remember but it seems like that in...

So it was the high spot of the week?

Well no, there were great pleasures in other ways. I mean one of my delights was when he would come home in the afternoon, because he stopped quite early, you know, he'd get there at dawn practically, and then he would come home at about 3 or 4, and when I was very small I always, it was my great pleasure to open the door to him. And it was the look on his face that was, I'll always remember all my life, the great joy he sort of, it was very nice to open the door.

And did you have tea with him or something then?

No, then he used to have his meal, and then, it always seemed better than anything we ever got. I don't think we were fed very well, I don't think my mother had a great idea about what would be considered nutrition. In fact at the age of 8 I had rheumatic fever which is caused by malnutrition, or one of the causes; I think it's also hereditary, I think my grandfather had it. But I think we had things like bread and sweets, or biscuits or cake or something. We had a few cooked meals but... I don't know, anyway... But I know I used to sit and watch him eating like a dog waiting, but... [LAUGHING]

But he got a good meal?

He got a good meal, yes.

And there wasn't a cook?

No, my mother, who was hopeless. I mean she was very beautiful, my mother, and a very lovely character, I'm sure she was innately an artist, and she played the piano Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 7 quite well, but she was hopeless at sewing and cooking, and I was always sort of pinned up in something she had sewn. There was a girl at school called Pat Turner who was immaculate, I mean, everything was ironed and clean; I always felt, oh God! Well, I've grown up rather so myself, I'm not really very sort of, you know, strictly domesticated.

Do you cook?

I do cook at times. I enjoy cooking, and at one time I nearly took a Cordon Bleu cookery course; I regret I didn't because it would have obviously enlarged my sort of repertoire what I could cook. But, I do cook, sort of.

But it's not a pleasure?

No, it's all right. Sometimes it is a pleasure, but it's usually, I'm so busy painting that it's a sort of, one hasn't really got the opportunity.

So, the house that you were living in at this point, what do you remember about that?

I remember it being big, it was a big house. It had certain...my rooms, until I was...I'm not quite sure how old... We left the house when I was 9 or 10; I had rheumatic fever when I was 8½ so I suppose when I was still about 7 I shared, what I can remember is, I shared a room with my brother, we had separate beds in a room, but then I was told to go and be on my own, and I did find that a bit odd, I couldn't quite understand why I had to have a room on my own, but anyway I did. And then I went up to another room. And then my mother and father had a room I think on the same floor, as the first when I... There must have been a room facing the garden and a room facing the street, I would think that sort of division. And my grandfather died in that house, he I believe had cancer, and when he was ill my father brought him to our house and that was, he was...he loved his father and I think when my grandfather died it was the first time I had ever and ever since seen my father cry in fact. So that was a memory of that house.

Did you know your grandparents well?

Well when we went down for these you know, Sundays, and for the first, I think certainly six years of my life, they were in the farm. Later my aunt lived there with Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 8 her husband, so I didn't stop going to the farm, but the years when my grandfather and grandmother were still alive they were there when we went down.

They lived there?

Yes, it was their farm and they lived there, and they left it to their children, and my aunt, my father's sister and her husband lived there after that, and now my cousin, their daughter, now lives there, so it's still in the family, the farm.

Do you visit it still?

Well, I don't visit it often now because my father, they had a sort of family system of leaving everything they had to their children, and my brother, when my parents died the farm I think was actually divided, but they decided my aunt would live there, but the farm itself went to my father and then to my elder brother, and my father passed the farm to my elder, well yes, my elder brother, I think when my grandparents died, or, no, it must have been later. Anyway, when he was in his early twenties he had the control of the farm, and unfortunately it was - now it breaks my heart to think about it - he, one of the things which was then coming into practice were the use of sprays, and not only that, there was this ghastly theory that the hedges - oh, I can't bear to think about it - the insects would come for the hedges, and of course there were...I certainly remember eating many apples which had maggots in them, and so in order to get them to sort of, you know, perfect market...no, I can't stand it, they cut down the hedges. Oh! And, anyway, there's another story attached to that later on but that was...

So, the house in London, was it a terraced house in the street, or...?

No, the house I moved to which I can remember when I was about probably 7 or 8, or younger, had five storeys, that was called Cazenove Road, and I went to Northwold Road school, which I can also remember, from that house. And then we moved, which is another typical, you know, route taken by Jews in London, to Golders Green in 1936, and...

Did you change schools at that point?

Oh yes, because I went to...I went to an amazing school in Golders Green which was a private school and it was run by two elderly women who were Victorians, it was very Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 9 Victorian their behaviour; that was 1936 and they were probably in their sixties, and they were awkward. And so it had this strange staff of Miss Forder, Miss Arthur, Miss Joan Courtney Luck, Miss Carmichael and Miss Fothergill. [LAUGHS] And, Joan Courtney Luck was exactly like Miss Brodie, she was wonderful, I adored her, and we were always amazed by Miss Joan Courtney Luck.

What was the academic level like?

Well very good, I mean, they weren't...they weren't as strict as the council school where, to my amazement at the age of 5 or 6 that someone hit me on the leg in a dancing class because I wasn't doing the proper steps. Now, I've never stopped being amazed by the shock of someone... My parents never hit me ever.

This was your first school?

My first school. Well the first school I can remember, I don't know if I...I think I went to a kindergarten school before that where the tables were very high, I do remember that. But this was the first memory of being...that was the Northwold Road school I think, that that happened. But anyway, but what we had was sort of sewing classes, and whoever took the class would read to us, which was very nice, I enjoyed that. And Miss Fothergill, we did woodwork and things with Miss Fothergill, and with Miss Carmichael I was supposed to learn to play the piano. My mother had a John Broadwood piano which I still have, but, it's a lovely tone the John Broadwood, and I've never got beyond Miss Carmichael's stage, I've got a fixation, I can't go beyond it. I can't understand why, it's weird. [LAUGHING]

So would you say that your upbringing was quite musical, or...?

Oh no, I think that, my mum was not a classical pianist, we played rag-time and all sorts of popular songs of the time. But we also, both there and in the farm had sort of, I think it was done in those days, sing-songs, family, you know, we would sort of sing round the piano. And I had an Aunt Rose, who was very important in my life, and she used to play the piano too. And then, my mother was taught by...because they had a wonderful house, my mother's grandparents, in Spital Square, which was a beautiful Georgian square, unfortunately it's vanished, but that was a lovely house, and we would go, I would go with my mother to see her parents. So probably those took up some Sundays, so I probably alternated between my farm grandparents, my father's parents, and the Spital Square house which was my mother's parents' and family. But Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 10 that was a large family of eight children, and they were absolutely hilarious. They too were in Spitalfields, so that's how my mother and father met. But they were wonderful, they were called Rubinstein and my mother used to say, when she played the piano, my mother, she would play too quickly and they were marching to this, and she would say, `Rubinstein, Rubinstein!' [LAUGHING] So, they all slowed down[??].

So you were well aware of a sort of extended family as an upbringing, I mean that was part of it?

Oh yes, there were huge families. There was my mother's, all my mother's brothers and sisters, then there were the cousins and the aunts, and there were the aged - well not...well, my father's aunts visited us, or we visited them, and they were quite an odd lot really. And they lived, my father's aunt lived in the East End, and we used, when I went to visit my grandparents there we would go to Petticoat Lane, and I remember that Hawksmoor Church, which is...

In Spitalfields?

Yes, which was just in front of their house, quite near their house. And, that surrounding, perhaps it still is, it was called Itchy Park, because all the tramps would sleep there, and, you know... [LAUGHS] And you would bring back these wonderful pickled herrings, and all the usual sort of... We would go and sort of bring things back for tea from there. And Mrs Marks with the pickle barrel and stuff.

Pickle barrel?

Well the pickled herring barrel, or, the pickled herrings, yes, but there was something in a barrel that Mrs Marks took out of the barrel that we would take amongst other things, take back for tea.

Was it quite a strictly religious upbringing?

Well, my mother's father was a fanatic, and he would never stop what was called dovening; he was always mumbling prayers. And I think it was because as a girl it wasn't considered important for me to learn Hebrew, but both my brothers were very involved with having their Bar Mitzvahs and learning Hebrew. And I wasn't taught, or I think I was taught but I wasn't very seriously taught, so I somehow... And I never Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 11 never enjoyed going to the cinema - not cinema, my God!, the synagogue. We went to... [LAUGHING] quite near. And then I think there was this thing, I don't think they washed on the Sabbath, it was sort of, they weren't supposed to do anything, you weren't supposed to light the fire. And, I never...I used to always find it such an awful procedure, and I never took to it really. And, I think I did have a sort of dichotomy of upbringing, because the people I really enjoyed, apart from my parents who I loved very much and some of my aunts who I really did like, and uncles, but I did like the farm people, who weren't Jewish, and so there was this divide really, or sort of two sorts of odd connections. Because one knew they weren't Jewish and also there was something about them which was different, the way they talked and behaved, so...

Were there books and so on in the house?

Well, there were the usual childhood books that, `Alice in Wonderland' and `Rupert', and my brother had a magazine called `Chums', I don't know, it was quite famous in its day. And then there were these strange stories, to us, of public schools, and, Bob Cherry and people like that, and it was another sort of language, other kind of attitudes in those stories. And also poems like `If', oh Kipling, and then, `If you play a clean straight bat, that my son is good enough for you,' and all that sort of thing.

And what about pictures, were there any paintings on the wall?

Well, in the farm there were...there was an enchanting sitting-room which looked onto a sort of garden with roses and lavender and orchards beyond it, and very clean windows and muslin curtains. And then, after lunch on Sunday the children would go into the...it was absolutely divine; it would be a very clean and sweet-smelling room, and Bessie would have lit a log fire which, and there were sort of thick rugs and armchairs in the room. And we had an old phonograph, you know, which would play things like `Me and Jane in a Plane' in that very old sort of sound it had that now one thinks... And there were...that was a room where I could sort of sit and look at things, and there were pictures on the wall of, they probably were reproductions of... Oh yes there was one painting a man had done of the farm which was quite nice; I think he went round painting people's farms and their houses and they bought them from him. And then there was, I'm sure a reproduction, of `Camels in the Desert' or `The Desert', I sort of remember that, but there weren't what I would now call art, you know.

You mean they weren't sort of established Royal Academicians, like some people had? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Page 12

No, no. No those were unknown to me really till, I don't... Well when we lived in Golders Green one of my pleasures was to walk through Golders Hill Park to the heath and then on to Kenwood, and then there was the Iveagh, you know, the Kenwood House collection, the Iveagh Bequest, so I saw the Vermeers there. But I didn't really...

That would have been later.

Oh yes, in childhood there was not... Oh yes, and there were pictures in story books, and I can remember, I adored this picture of the fairies, the mauve fairies in the moonlight or something. But it was one of my favourite.

Who would that have been by, somebody like Dulac or somebody?

I really don't know. I don't know if it was good or, I just happened to find it enchanting in some way. But, I don't know actually who, I don't...I don't think...I'm sure I don't have the book.

When you went to your first school, I mean are there any strong memories of that, or was it the second school?

Well, the memories of the first school, which was Northwold Road school, was that it was, I think it was boys and girls but not mixed classes, so my brother went to that school and we would go together sometimes, but there would be a divide, the boys' school and the girls' school part of it. And in that school I do remember Miss Osborne, she was one of our teachers, and I was probably about 9 or... I did get a scholarship from that school, and I did write an essay which she thought, she gave me very good marks for, she thought was very good, and I did decide then - I didn't think of being a painter, that I would be a writer. And there was an advertisement for a girls' magazine and.....

End of Track 1: Tape 1: Side A Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 13 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B

.....was the...oh because of her...because she was very difficult to please, Miss Osborne, and so that meant rather a lot to me. And I joined this magazine, and to my amazement it was rather up-market, and they had a literary luncheon in Foyles and Louis Golding was one of the, the speakers at that literary luncheon. And I think I was at a table with somebody who was the Queen's Equerry, and I remember him whispering, he was terribly good-looking and he said to the woman next to him, `Who is she?' Because one of my father's porters from Spitalfields took me there - Jackie his name was. And, anyway that was my launch into the literary world.

How old were you?

I was about, I suppose, 10 or 11-ish. [LAUGHS] Anyway, but I have always kept... And when I was in my teens I lived...I moved...when I first moved from home one of the places I moved to was in Montagu Square quite near by, it was Regent's Park, and I did think of going to Bedford College and taking a course in English literature, and I didn't. Two things I regret about Montagu Square, one was I didn't take the Cordon Bleu cookery course and the other was that I didn't go to Bedford College. Because I am totally...I left school at the age of 13 because war broke out, and I had no further education, and I went to an art school when I was 15, so my academic training was minimal.

We'll come on to that, but, what I was going to ask, obviously you were a bright child.

Yes, my brother was always first, he has a better brain than I have, and a much better memory and can retain facts, and also is articulate, far more than I am. But I was always second to him. We weren't in the same classes but our marks were, he would be first, I was second, usually.

And what were the subjects you enjoyed? Writing, obviously English.

I suppose writing. I think I had a sort of fairly equal interest in all of them. I don't think anyone, any of them... I mean I even quite liked algebra and things like that. Yes, I don't remember particularly liking writing more than the others, it was just Miss Osborne's praise so much, she was so dreadfully dry and unsmiling, it was like being taught by the Sphinx in a way.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 14 Did you have to do sport?

Well this is where it had quite... Because I had rheumatic fever when I was 8½ I was left with mitral stenosis, which is, the mitral valve is scarred, and the heart has a murmur, and stenosis means murmur I believe, and my father was worried about my, you know, doing sports, he thought it might damage my heart further, so I didn't. We played netball I think at Northwold Road. But it did have a determining factor when I won a scholarship, and when we moved to Golders Green I could have gone to a school called the Henrietta Barnett school which was a local, a sort of, anyway a step up from the school I had been attending, and, I suppose it's the equivalent of a grammar school. But, he wouldn't let me go because he said there was...it was awful, the sports would...I wouldn't be able to take part in the sports. Well so what, but I would have had a good education. But I went instead, which I'll never regret, to Miss Forder's and Miss Arthur's, because I learnt something from them in a curious way.

So you didn't do anything really sport-wise?

No, apart from vaguely... I mean, my heart for years compensated apparently, then it was called compensating, so it meant I lived quite a normal life really. But I think there was a sort of limit, I could not ever become an athlete, you know, golden medallist or anything like that, but within, you know, normal sloshing about on the tennis court stuff I could do. And it was silly not to. Anyway... I think he was very afraid, because he did the same thing to my brother; my brother won a scholarship and he could have gone to the Bluecoat school, and he would have gone on to university and that would have been a far better thing for him to have done, but my father I think was afraid that we would lose our Jewishness, not that I had much but...so he prevented my brother, he wouldn't let him go to that school either. And so my brother, who was clever, his schooling ended at 14 too.

You've mentioned another brother.

A younger brother, yes, he was born, he was...he was born when I...I went to a convalescent home when I had rheumatic fever and he was born whilst I was there; I was there four months, and he was born in June, so he's a bit younger than I, he's 8½ years younger than I am, or just...not quite 8½. July he was born. Well he's 8 and a bit years younger.

What's his name? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 15

Maurice, which was my grandfather's name. So, he was named after my grandfather.

Do you remember going to this nursing - not nursing home, convalescent home?

Oh yes.

Was it horrible?

No, but unfortunately my father believes I got rheumatic fever because I went to it. I had had scarlet fever, and I think it does lead to rheumatic fever, and I'm not sure what the symptoms were, but my mother was pregnant and I think in order for me to get proper care, I don't know whether I had had symptoms to make them think that I should go, but I did go to a convalescent home in Newbury, which is near Reading, and it was...I became quite friendly with some of the other children who were there. But they had open sheds, and they sent me to sleep in the open shed. And of course suddenly they found I had a temperature of 105, and then my heart was affected, and my father really does blame them for my getting rheumatic fever.

They weren't cow sheds?

Well they were sheds that were part of a convalescent home, and I don't know, nowadays it would sound weird but that's...I can remember they had these great open fronts and you were literally sleeping in the open air.

Well they believed in that at that time. Katharine Mansfield I think used to have to go and, had to breathe in...that's why I said cow sheds, breathe in the breath of cows or something, it was supposed to help.

Yes they weren't...I didn't have tuberculosis, but whatever it was and whatever the reasons I got rheumatic fever. I had, my heart was affected then. And I can remember a vicar coming round, because I was in a ward with some, a boy who was wonderful now I look back on it, he was such fun, but he was paralysed, he had one of those hoops over his leg. I don't know why he was paralysed, but he was quite a friend and I...somehow one ignored, or he ignored and the rest of us...and just spoke to him normally and he was very nice. But the vicar came round and he looked at me and he said, `Oh you poor child,' and I thought, what's he saying poor child for? I didn't know that... [LAUGHING] Anyway... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 16

Did you make close friends at this early age, do you remember?

When I was in Cazenove Road I made friends with a boy, there were two boys next door, one was called Lawrence, I can't think of the name of the other, Bill I think, or would it have been...I don't think so. But they, we visited, they came into our house quite often. And I noticed a huge difference between their parents and my parents because I think they were Jewish, but it wasn't that; the difference was that they were very sexually affectionate to each other, and I've never ever seen my parents kissing each other, and I was astonished that I saw this lovely woman, she was lovely I do remember, and he wasn't, but I realised now he would have been very attractive but I thought he looked like a sort of ape in some way. [LAUGHS] There they were, and it astonished me.

So your parents were quite sort of discreet with each other?

Very, yes. And very shy. And I never, not only did I never see them naked, but I don't think they ever...they used to sort of not really look at me either, it was so sort of...they used to put a towel up, my mother, if I had a bath, and I would step into the towel. It was...it's very hard now to understand it.

Were they affectionate to you, your mother kissed you and things like that, or not?

Yes, they... I don't think I was...I was more kissed by the aunts than by my parents, but they were immensely, one knew they, I really knew they absolutely adored me, I do know that.

But it was expressed in a different way?

In the way I was looked at, or talked to, or... I do remember when we would come home from the farm and it would be quite late at night, comparatively anyway, and we would be walking, we would get, which was lovely, an open tram at the time, or an open bus, we could go upstairs, I always liked going upstairs, or perhaps we didn't on the way back, but there would be a walk to go to their house, the bus didn't go up in front of the house, and I remember saying, `Carry me home Daddy,' and he used to shove me up on his shoulders, which was... And I still say that to people with whom I've lived, `Carry me home Daddy'. [LAUGHS]

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 17 And were you aware of, I suppose being part of the Jewish community, I mean did you...you lived in sort of Jewish areas.

In Jewish areas, yes. Oh yes. But even there, because we were in London and in areas where there were both Jews and Christians, now one wouldn't say, you know, Jews and Christians, they would say `other people', but, there were always people who weren't Jewish who, the people who were in the house who were helping us, and the people at school, it wasn't an exclusively... In Golders Green my brothers, one...no, they went to Wessex Gardens School which was again a non-denominational school, but... Anyway, but there was I think a Jewish school there that my brother either went there to learn their Hebrew, I can't exactly remember. But as I say, it wasn't a totally Jewish, it wasn't like living in Tel Aviv, for example; well it was, one... So I was always aware of people who weren't Jewish. And also another thing, we weren't supposed to attend prayers because they were Christian prayers, but I do remember the prayers so I must have either heard them or perhaps...

Were you aware of any anti-Jewish feeling?

No. Yes, the only, the first time I became aware of it was when I was at St Martin's later on.

Later on.

A girl in the cloakroom said she disliked Jews, so I said, you know, out, `I am a Jew,' sort of. She said, `I don't care, I still don't like them.' [LAUGHS] But of course, ah! what I was aware of was Hitler, and I can remember at a very early age saying to my father, `Why is Hitler trying to kill the Jews?' And...

How early do you think that was?

And that was quite early on. Well it's the...I suppose I was about 9, 8 or 9.

Gosh.

And that was '33, 1933 or 4. So, I suppose through the newspapers or the radio, we had a radio. And so I became aware of it. I don't know if I realised it was sort of, you know, world-wide or, I didn't even, I wasn't aware of it in England, but I do remember a friend I had then, Pat Dory who was Jewish, and they lived across the road, and we Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 18 wrote to the Prime Minister, she and I, because on the train to Paddock Wood there were these new towns, you know, extension of villages into small towns, like Sevenoaks and Orpington which are now quite large towns, but one saw all the building going on, and obviously it's inevitable because people... But I think it must be generally agreed, there's not architectural building, you know, there hasn't been for quite a few decades, so they were pretty hideous. And I was appalled by them because I sort of loved the countryside. And so she and I wrote this ridiculous letter to the Prime Minister saying we regretted...there wasn't some, you know, control over what was built. And...

Did you get a reply?

Yes, a very polite reply, from, not from the Prime Minister himself, I think one of his secretaries, saying, the Prime Minister acknowledged our letter.

Did you think of yourself more as a country girl?

Ah, no, there's a sequence to that, that her parents were very cross that she had written the letter and she said, `We are Jews and you must not write, as Jews you must not...' And I thought, what the hell is she talking about? But she sort of felt we ought to keep a very low profile.

Right, not to attract...?

No. We didn't write, `We are Jews.' [LAUGHS] But that was a sort of surprise, you know, something one had to think about.

Where does the name Blow come from?

Well it's such a ludicrous story, I don't even know if it's true, it's just what I was told, that when my great-great-whatever got here, from...

From where?

And again I don't even quite know, I think...I think my mother's family came from Poland, but I think we came from, I think Austria or in that area. And, I'm not exactly, I don't know exactly. And they couldn't speak English, and they...I think it was awfully lax in those days, and whoever, whichever, probably my great-great- Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 19 Zeida[ph] was asked his name, and he sneezed and blew his nose, and they wrote down Blow. [LAUGHING]

I don't believe it!

It's true, I mean that's what I was told. [LAUGHS]

A wonderful story.

Wonderful story. I've often asked if I'm related to Dr John Blow or Detmar Blow or Jonathan Blow. I'm not.

And do you think, did you think of yourself then as more of a country girl than a city girl?

No, but I looked for country type of places in cities. We lived, when we were in Stoke Newington we were near the Hackney Marshes, and my brother and I would go, and I found them wonderful, the walks along the Hackney Marshes in those days where there were Gypsies and barges. And then I also when we were in Golders Green, the natural place to go for me was the heath and Kenwood, so it was a combination. I didn't look for the town in the country but I looked for the country in the town. And I did love landscapes, it became a part of my work in a sort of way later on. And my mother, another great really important part of my childhood, my mother was an incredibly sweet woman and that's not what...but we would go for seaside holidays, probably for two weeks only, but we would go to Margate or Cliftonville quite often, sometimes to Bournemouth, but there the sea memories and the delight of the sea, and my mother's great kindness always, and kind of digging in the sand and that, and that was a very enjoyable, very happy, special time. And my father would come down I think once during the holiday. And I would go, quite often Aunt Rose would come with us, because she was very important to me later on, and so that was a part of my childhood.

Would you stay in...

We stayed at boarding houses, usually Jewish ones I think, but not mostly Jewish but very...they were always pleasant, and I have photographs of that time of the seaside holidays. And I think my grandmother, my mother's mother, there's a photograph of Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 20 her in Cliftonville and they...they were pretty places in this kind of way. And the whole thing was exciting, you know, to be there.

How did you feel once you were no longer the youngest, you know, had another brother on the scene?

I didn't mind. We were very fond of him. I think I was more fond of him than my brother, my elder brother, because there was a time when he was kind of coughing or choking, and I was terrified, I thought he was going to choke to death, and I rushed out to my other brother and said, `I think he's going to die'. And my mother was with him. But, you know, it's frightening - or [INAUDIBLE] frightening, but I was frightened. And my brother said, `So what?' [LAUGHING] So that was...

Well I suppose it was another boy, so he was...he was kind of threatened by that more than you were as the youngest.

Yes, I... I never minded him in that way, no. I think my brother minded me when I was born, because it was far too soon after his own. He's only sixteen months older than I am but I think the first...and he was sent away when I was born, he was sent to live with my, or stay with my grandparents in Kent.

Why?

Because I think, so my mother, she couldn't really cope with looking after a child of...you know, he was only sixteen...so he still had to be cared for, and I think for my birth he stayed with my grandparents. And he became very attached to the farm and them, they became really very important to him. But he, the first thing he did apparently when he saw me, I don't remember it was, he hit me. [LAUGHS] And I do remember that, in all our growing up, well we were friends but there was a sort of reticence somehow.

Competitiveness?

No. No he was cleverer, there was no need to compete. But I think he just would have prefered it if I hadn't been there. [LAUGHS]

What kind of...

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 21 He wouldn't say that now, but I can remember.

What kind of leisure pursuits would your mother have had? I mean did she...did you go out places, I mean would she have gone to the theatre, music halls and things?

Yes they did go, and they...I'm not sure if they went to the theatre or the cinema, but we were all cinema sort of mad in those...and I used to go at the age of sort of 7 and 8 on my own. I couldn't go in because you weren't allowed to, and I would ask people in the queue to take me in, the adults, which they did. I mean I would give them my money and they would take me in with them, pay for, get my ticket. And my brother and I would go to the cinema, we were mad about the cinema.

What sort of films were you watching?

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, and one I didn't like, which was about, oh, I had nightmares about it, I think it was some sort of Zulu war or something. I always dreamt about the Zulus and the spears flying through the air. [LAUGHS]

But, and so you think your mother would have gone to the cinema, or your parents would have gone...?

Yes, because I can remember, they either went to the cinema or the theatre, but they would come back and if we were awake they would come into us and they would bring us chocolates back from the cinema. And one of the cinemas I can remember had stars all over it, it was one of those wonderfully 1930s decorated cinemas.

Where would that have been, in Stoke Newington?

Stamford Hill.

Stamford Hill. And what about, did she have hobbies or something, your mother, like sort of embroidery or anything like that?

No. The piano was really her sort of amusement world. And I think her pleasures were playing the piano, singing, and going to the theatres I think would have been, and her family visits. There was a lot of visiting, much more than I think, you know, happens to me for example with my family, but they were always visiting each other. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 22

And what about your father, was he sort of, would he like to go to the races or anything like that?

No, he wasn't what you might call a fun-loving man. My mother was really a real flapper and a darling, but my father was rather serious, and really rather silent, and I always, later I began to feel, or when I tried to think back on him, that he had a sort of silent rage that, because we were all rather afraid of him. He was never violent but one felt, we tried, there was almost a conspiracy amongst us to not upset him. And I think he...he would have had difficulty in containing his anger, and I think he controlled himself with us. But I do remember that once years later when I was a painter, and before I got my own place, I painted on my mother's bed, because I had a long view along the corridor of works at the end of the corridor, and I've always liked as long a view as I can get away from my work. And I got paint on her blanket, and I took the blanket down and tried to wash the paint off, and the blanket was so heavy with water I couldn't lift it out of the thing. And my father and my brother came in, my younger brother, and there was I struggling and the whole place was filled with water. And they actually left the house, they couldn't take...

They walked out again?

They walked out again.

What, in case they got angry, or...?

In case they got angry I think.

So there was a kind of explosiveness there.

Explosiveness.

Did you ever see it explode?

Never.

But you were aware of it?

We were very aware of it, and there was as I say a conspiracy of silence that... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 23

Did you feel you were tip-toeing around a bit?

Yes.

But that didn't matter?

It seemed to be natural to the situation that one was in.

It wasn't resented?

It wasn't resented, but it must have been inhibiting, because there was a sense of strain in the house. And I was glad...

Did that tell on your mother?

Yes, I think it did, because she became very nervous, yes. I think she probably was of a nervous disposition, but actually she was very brave. I mean I had always thought of her...but she was totally, she was really quite heroically brave in the war when the bombs were falling. So it was a different sort of, I think just the strain of dealing with this controlled sort of anger really.

And that didn't come out in his work or anything, it was just there.

Well apparently, but we never saw it. He was a bastard in Spitalfields, I mean he would shout and swear. And never swore at home, and never shouted, or got close to it but never quite... We would know he was angry, so everything was done to down- pedal, you know. And it was...I'm afraid it has affected me since, because I do avoid confront...

Confrontations.

Confrontations, yes. And I often, I wish I...but it simply has become, it became ingrained in my nature, because it was like rocking...it wasn't oneself in confrontation with one to one person. If it involved my mother it was to protect my mother I think really that one didn't want to upset him.

Did it make you a bit of a diplomat? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 24

Oh, I think so, and I regret it. I don't like it, I'm aware of it, but, and I try not to, but it's there, it is there.

And you say, do you think you take after your mother more, or do you have your father's temper as well?

I think both. My father made the decisions, and now I'm both my own mother and father's work because I have to make all my own decisions, so in that sense, but my mother didn't, but my mother did know what she liked and didn't like, so her decisions were within herself, yes.

Do you think she had much influence over your father, or not?

Well again, he was tied to her because of us, and so, no well this strange, you know, almost like a ballet looking back at it, I can suddenly see it, where we were all dancing to each other's tunes really.

She didn't have any sort of business interest that she had brought into the family?

No, absolutely none.

That was all him?

Absolutely, totally controlled the finances, which now I do because there were no...everything I buy or sell or whatever I have to control, or, anyway, take charge of. But she, I think she was very sensitive, and certainly had the feelings of an artist, I would think, and the sensitivity and perception and kindness. I think sadly, and this is again part of my upbringing, of my sense of myself, it's that he didn't really respect her, he didn't respect her judgement, and perhaps she had no judgement; in those days women were taught not to have, you know, and so whatever judgements she...I think she had a great deal of sense and sensitivity and understanding, but he called the shots really, and... She was beautiful, and I think he was enormously, obviously I mean in love with her, attracted to her, but his real kind of companion was his sister Fanny, who was rather the same type as he was, another, you know, Cold Comfort Farm type, like Aunt Ada in the wood shed, she was also rather... Well, that's not fair to have to say that, but she was quite, quite clever, and he liked to talk to her. I think it's a fairly... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Page 25

What do you mean by Cold Comfort Farm?

Well there's an Aunt Ada in `Cold Comfort Farm' who was in the wood shed or had been...who was a sort of bottled-up sort of, you know, controlling figure, but...

And you felt your aunt was like that?

No no, I felt...well I felt...it suddenly came into my mind as we were talking, but she lived out on the farm and so perhaps the association would have been made in that way. She lived at Paddock Wood. But she was, again, a woman who didn't really say a lot but could exert a kind of angry pressure on others, and I never really felt comfortable with her.

End of Track 2: Tape 1: Side B Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 26 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A

.....whether your father used to take you out, I mean do you remember being taken out by him alone?

Yes he did, yes. The outings to places other than the family were with him, because he took us to the Tower of London, and the Waxworks. I can't remember other places.

Would they have been fun occasions?

He was...he wasn't frightening, it was much later I became aware of that quality in him; as a child I was never afraid of him, and he absolutely adored me, and he wasn't threatening to either of us. And he was authoritative when it was necessary, like don't run over the road or whatever, but he...it wasn't with the same... I think it was probably after the war, and I think that my mother, at the beginning of the war my mother and he had thought of getting divorced, and this is one of the regrets of my life that he... My mother talked to me about it and she said that, `How would you feel if we got divorced?' And unfortunately I had no pre-knowledge of it, and the question suddenly, unexpectedly being asked, I just burst into tears. And unfortunately they didn't get divorced, and...

Do you think they should have done?

I think they should have done, and I think they would have...what I am talking of now, later, was probably because they didn't get divorced. Because I wasn't aware of it before. He was always the strong figure in the household, but not to the extent that there was this explosive feeling about it.

It suggests that it had become a bit insufferable for both of them.

Yes, yes.

Do you think there was anyone else?

Yes, I think...my mother had two affairs, and I don't think the first was an affair with a divorced person, but when we were evacuated at the beginning of the war I think she met a rather charming, I don't even know where it was or when, but it was at the Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 27 beginning of the war I think when we were evacuated, and I do remember this man very vaguely but he was charming. And although they may not have had an affair I think there was certainly a feeling between them, and it may have been to do with that. I never knew details of why they wanted to get divorced. But they weren't each other's companions, and I think he did find that difficult for him and she found it difficult for her. And then she did have an affair. I don't...even though this is for the sound archives I don't think I want to say with whom, but there was a known affair with one of the in-laws of the family, and that obviously too must have affected him, and they then began to sleep in separate bedrooms.

Difficult if it's in the family as well.

Yes, I don't know how aware he was of that, but he must have known I would have thought. But the fact that they weren't sharing the same bedroom and so on. In those days of course it wasn't as prevalent as now, and...

Yes. Where were you evacuated to?

Well to begin with we went to the farm, and then after a year the Battle of Britain took place overhead, and my brother went to a local...

So it was 1939 you were evacuated?

Yes, I was 13. My birthday is September the 14th and war broke out on September the 3rd, and a week later I was 14, so I was still 13 in 1939 - no I was 14 in 1939, yes. God! I thought I was 13. No, I was 14.

Yes, just 14.

Just 14. That's right, I was just...I was 13.

13, and then you became 14.

That's right, I was, it was true, I was. And my brother went to the village school and then I would collect him from it and bring him home, and one day when we were coming home a bomb fell in front of us on the path, so we couldn't go forward, and then another bomb fell behind us, so we couldn't go backwards. So we were there, stuck between the two bombs. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 28

Was it too terrifying?

No, it wasn't frightening at all, for some reason. I don't know why.

You weren't in any danger?

We were I suppose.

You must have been.

Might have been killed, yes. I mean if we had been a few steps in front or a few steps behind.

Well didn't it create a great big explosion?

It did, but, I don't know why we weren't afraid. We weren't. But I do remember, I was rather proud of... On one occasion in the farm there was a raid overhead, and we were in the hall-way and Aunt Fanny suggested we lay flat because of the shrapnel and things like that, even though we were in the hall-way. But my brother wouldn't, he would not lie down, and he just stood up the whole time. He was only 6, he just stood there. And my Aunt Annie, my father had two sisters, Aunt Fanny and...there was a very good spirit in those days, and I don't think...I mean looking back now I realise we were in huge danger from the Germans, and nobody had any belief, the people I knew and within myself, I never for one moment thought we wouldn't win the war, and it was so illogical when you now realise how close it all was. But there was, perhaps it was sort of...Churchill was doing it or whatever, but it was the spirit of, one just felt invincible in some curious way. I think there was a great thing about being English still, the power of that, and so that... And I remember my Aunt Annie when she was there and she picked up, she had a rifle she had found so that if anyone comes to... [LAUGHING] Oh well... There was some family story of one of my great-great aunts, her husband was in the Russian Army or something and she followed him with bowls of soup everywhere he went.

Wonderful. Initially to the farm, then you were moved from there...

Yes, I was there until 1940 and the Battle of Britain, and then we moved to Henley and we stayed on a farm with Mrs Stonehouse I think they were called, which is a Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 29 mile outside Henley, where that huge hill that leads out from Henley, and I had a bicycle so there was great... And that, we stayed there for a while. And I think for a short while perhaps, I can't think when that would have been though, perhaps it was... We stayed with Mr Cheeseman with my younger brother back in Kent, I can't think why we were unless the Battle of Britain was over. But that was for a short while. But he remembers that.

Who was that?

My younger brother, Maurice.

Maurice, yes.

Because he was sort of 6 or 7 at the time. And so I was really in charge of him when we were evacuated.

Did your parents stay in London?

Yes, my mother was absolutely insouciant about everything. I do remember being mildly astonished then, because I had thought of her as being rather nervous, but she... But they did...they moved to a huge block of flats called The White House in Regent's, it's still there I think, near Regent's Park, because they thought that the concrete was safer than their sort of house in Golders Green, so they rented this flat during the war and they went back to Golders Green. And my father was a fire watcher, you know, which meant that he would be on duty at various times fire watching.

What, on the roof or...?

Mm, on the roofs and whatever. And my Aunt Rose stayed with us, that was very important to me, because, I think the sequence was, we first went to the farm, then we went to Henley, and I don't know when we fitted in the Cheesemans but we were there briefly. And then at the age of 15 Aunt Rose stayed with us in Golders Green, because her husband, well he was in the Eighth Army, and she had a friend, Dr Minnie Atkins, who had been a child, or...you know, a teenage friend when she had been younger, and Minnie had gone to university and she was a qualified doctor, and clever. And she visited us in Golders Green, she visited Rose, but she saw my Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 30 sketches, and it was she who suggested I went to an art school, she thought I had talent.

Minnie?

Minnie Atkins, Dr Minnie Atkins. And had she not, I didn't even know what an art school was, I wouldn't have gone to an art school.

So this was your friend, the friend of Aunt Rose.

Yes, Aunt Rose's friend. That's in the Sackler catalogue, there's a photograph of Aunt Rose.

It said that Aunt Rose suggested you went to St Martin's.

In fact it was Aunt Rose's friend, Minnie Atkins.

Could you explain how Aunt Rose comes into the picture, and when?

She was my mother's younger sister, and she was, I think, a very clever...she too was deprived of an education by her very sort of fanatical Jewish father and...

The women had a bit of a rough time?

Very, very.

Were you aware of that from a young age?

No, I wasn't aware. I'm aware of it now but I wasn't then. But I knew Aunt Rose was frustrated, because she was, somehow wasn't being properly, I suppose the word is fulfilled really, but she was, she did have a marvellous personality. And I think I may have had a crush on her in a way, I do think she was rather wonderful, and she was I think. She was very brave, the things she did confront, and she also confronted intelligently, and I admired her enormously for that. And she wasn't afraid of my father.

Other people were?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 31 In our house, yes, but she wasn't. I suppose she didn't have...you know, I think whatever the situation, she would sort of speak up and... But she wasn't aggressive, and she was enormous fun, and she loved what...she had a great love for life and zest, and very sadly she died at an early age, 55, of cancer. But when I knew her she was in her twenties, and...

She was closer to your age?

Yes. She was my mother's younger sister and there are eight in my mother's family. I think she was about, well if I was 15 and she...she was about twelve years younger, older, younger, whatever.

Older.

Older than I was, yes.

And was she married?

She was married to a man called Louis, Louis, and he didn't come back from...he did come back, that's right, but then he went off again, and I presume they were divorced eventually, but...

Was it...I mean was this, I suppose usual to happen, I mean divorce and so on, or not?

What, in...?

At that time.

No it wasn't, it was extremely unusual, and it was a scandal really. And it was difficult to obtain.

Yes that's what I thought.

I don't remember if she was actually divorced, but I think, they were very in love before the war and then the war broke out and he joined the Army and went to, he was with Montgomery in Africa; he came back after the war and they lived together, they had all sorts of places they bought and tried to do various things which didn't succeed greatly. And of course he was immensely extravagant. He was very likeable, and Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 32 good-looking, but extravagant, and I think... Then he went - some weird Evelyn Waugh-ish sort of story about, he went to Africa and got a worm inside, I really don't know if that's true or not, and I don't know whether he died there or whether he just vanished, and I don't really know the details of it, but he didn't come back, and eventually she married someone else.

Did she have any children?

No, she didn't. I don't know whether that was by choice or whether they just didn't have them.

But you weren't a kind of substitute child for her, you sound more like a friend.

Well, it was...well none of those, I would say, we had a kind of sexless affair really. I really loved her, and I admired her enormously, and I found her very exciting. And we went on wonderful holidays together. During the war we went to...we seemed to go all over England; we went to Scotland, we climbed Ben Nevis, we went to Morar, we went to Hereford, and we went to Cornwall, we went to Launceston, we stayed there. And she was full of life and interest and original, and she had great spirit and lots of courage and she was her own person, she had her own views. It was very...she was a very unusual woman compared to the other women I knew. She was sort of a free spirit really, and a lot of guts and fun. And she had a great laugh, I mean not, she didn't bellow but she just had something of great charm and joy about her. And she played the piano and sang. But she was daring, that's what I liked about her, he who dares. So...

Yes. So you obviously had been drawing at this point otherwise her friend, Dr Atkins, wouldn't have seen anything.

No, I did some drawings of the oast houses I believe, so I must have...I can't remember doing them particularly but I did, obviously did them. I did draw and paint at school, we were...well that was one of the classes at Miss Forder's I would presume we had, although I seem to remember the boxes we made rather than the paintings. But the paintings existed.

Boxes, boxes?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 33 We made sort of, Miss Fothergill taught us how to make...we had boxes which we then, somehow we would burn things into them, I'm not even...

What like poker-work?

Yes that's right, that, whatever. It was obviously her pet hobby.

Wooden boxes?

Wooden boxes.

What, like a cigar box or something?

Yes. No they were like pencil boxes, not as flat as a cigar box. I really didn't know what it was for, but I do remember one of the boxes. And I don't have any, I never kept them.

But you must have had a little art teaching as well, so...

I had art. There were art classes in, I'm sure Northwold Road school, and then we had art classes with Miss Forder and Miss Arthur but I don't think that, I only remember the boxes, I don't remember painting or being told how to paint at either place really. But I did do sketches which I did during the war, I must have done, because when I was 15 I went to St. Martin's, which was in 19...I was 15 in 1940 so I must have gone before September in 1941. I either went and visited them to say I wanted to come early in the year, because we came back from Kent and I don't suppose we were at Henley all that long.

But was this, I mean it sounds very sudden, I mean, why were you so convinced?

Convinced about what?

That you should go to St Martin's.

Well, that when Minnie Atkins said I should go to an art school, although I hadn't heard of such things as art schools I thought, what a wonderful idea, I just thought, I got terribly excited by the idea, it was astonishing. And so probably, I can't even remember but I imagine it would have been with the help of Aunt Rose or whether I Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 34 did it on my own, we found out what art schools there were to go to, and St Martin's was the one that we chose, which, although we didn't know it we had chosen one of the best art schools. But it was like sticking a pin in really.

Pure luck.

Pure luck.

You didn't know anyone in that world.

No, nobody, it was absolutely unknown to me that world.

So how was the approach made? Did you just sort of turn up with Aunt Rose, or...?

No, I don't even remember Rose being involved in it, but she must have been if Minnie Atkins suggested it, and certainly she would have far more, she was 28 at the time, know-how about how to find an art school, because I probably wouldn't have known how to look for one, so, it must have been through her, but I don't remember that part of it. What I remember is taking my work to St Martin's and being accepted to join St Martin's.

Who did you take it to, the Principal?

Mm.

Who was?

I can't remember now. I think, am I wrong? I mean one would have to look it up. The name that comes into my mind was Mr Morse.

Yes there was a Morse there.

Ah, yes. But, it was the teachers who were wonderful there, because, there was Ruskin Spear who stayed really connected throughout my career, my subsequent career, because he was at the College when I was taught there.

One wouldn't automatically associate you with Ruskin Spear, Sandra.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 35 Oh, well, Ruskin Spear, it was really because of Ruskin Spear I went on painting, that he, he was incredibly encouraging and he kept on saying to me, `Bloody good'. [LAUGHS] And, he always praised everything I did. And then when I became an abstract painter he said, `England's lost her best portrait painter.'

So what sort of work, I mean did you have a lot to take along to St Martin's when you went there?

Not much I couldn't have taken along.

No.

No. I mean my first...I don't know whether this was the first actual lesson or whether I was asked to do something there, but I do remember that Mr Swann was teaching there, Robert Swann, who also later on was a neighbour in Sydney Close years later but a short while before he died. But I do remember the very first drawing I did, thing I did, was to be taken to the room with casts and there was a big head of David, and I drew from the cast with Mr Swann, the very first thing I ever did at St Martin's. And that was probably after I had been accepted.

Do you think you had a natural ability?

I had some natural, I must have, and I did have some natural ability. But what was the revelation was when I was there I just felt I was in paradise. I mean it was absolutely, absolute ecstasy to be in St Martin's, and to just draw. I mean it was so wonderful to me.

Do you mean doing the art or meeting the people, or the whole atmosphere?

Just drawing, the art, and the experience of painting and drawing was quite, it was ecstatic.

How was it structured? Presumably you weren't allowed to paint to begin with.

No. Well I do remember the life class, and then there were, I've got some of the old drawings still, you know, tonal drawing from the model. Then we had various classes which, I was hopeless at all of them. There was the... Oh I've got something sticky in... There was...I put some oil paint in my hair and it's got stuck. I'm sorry. There Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 36 were anatomy, perspective, and there was this ghastly class of the, oh yes, anatomy I suppose. And we went to St Thomas's Hospital to look at...oh, kind of bits of corpses. I can't think why I was so...

Cadavers!

And I also, it stayed, the smell of the formaldehyde, it was in my nostrils, and when I...I became so neurotic about it, the smell of it stayed with me, and it was a horrendous experience. Anyway, and all my...the architecture, or the perspective, I'm not quite sure what, but I do remember drawing Greek temples, and I made all the columns look like milk bottles, it was so awful. [LAUGHING] It was a total disaster.

Were you very much younger than the other students or were there a number of you of your age?

No, well, one of my contemporaries was Evelyn Williams who I admired enormously and her work was almost formed then. I mean it took me years to form some style of my own, but she, I mean her work now I can absolutely recognise the drawings she did at St Martin's.

I don't know her work.

Well she does large sort of, mostly female I think, heads, and then she was doing groups of females, in flowing robes I think some of them. But, they looked awfully clever to me and I really... And who else was there? I don't think anyone I know now as a painter was there, but Evelyn Williams was there. And then there were a few men who for various reasons couldn't be in the Army or, but not many. But the teachers were very good. There was Pitchforth, who did these wonderful drawings; they all did drawings on your sheet of paper. And Ruskin. Ruskin, I fell in love with Ruskin. He was very very encouraging to me, and because of Ruskin I had enough confidence to go on with it. He really made me feel I had something and I was all right. And, I did absolutely adore him, in fact I followed him once to Cornwall. I think Aunt Rose and I went to Cornwall where he was on holiday with... But, I never pestered him really, but...and he never responded in that way to me, but he was enormously encouraging. I really think he was, with Minnie Atkins and Aunt Rose, the foundations of why I went on really.

And so, you were painting in a very representational sort of way? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 37

Yes, yes.

I mean was there sort of a house style as it were?

Yes, it was Sickert really, I think, the way we painted, the way Ruskin painted, I mean it was sort of based on Sickert. And I do remember the way I would paint, I would lay in a dark ground and then I would, the highlights, I would build the form with line and the light and shade effect on top of the usually brownish coloured ground. And I still have the portrait, the small portrait that I did at that time.

You said Ruskin praised your portraits; I mean did you start to paint people at this point?

Well that's all we had to paint, we were always drawing or painting a model.

You weren't sort of doing landscapes or houses?

Well, I then, yes, outside St Martin's I tried to do, I remember painting in that bombed out church in Soho doing a painting there, and I did, when we were on holiday I painted, I did landscapes. I loved landscapes, I did like landscape drawing. I don't have any of those left but I do have one of the heads of one of the models that I did at St Martin's, and a seated figure I did at St Martin's. And I did a nude which actually I put into the Academy, and it was hung on the line, I was really thrilled to bits with that, that was when I was still a student. In those days being hung on the line was, it doesn't seem to mean anything nowadays but it did in those days.

So Ruskin was the big influence?

Mm.

And Pitchforth was good?

Well Pitchforth simply opened my eyes to drawing form and light and shade, and lovely drawings, so there was beautiful feeling about.

He was a great watercolourist wasn't he?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 38 Yes. He didn't demonstrate that when I was...one saw them, you know, later on but I didn't see them then.

Anyone else you can remember teaching there?

Yes, there was Guthrie, and a man called McCulloch who was always drunk.

Guthrie, what, the printer?

Robin Guthrie, he was a painter. He died, I think he committed suicide actually, poor man. And McCulloch who just sat there reading the `Daily Mirror' and would rush out to the pub the first moment he could get out, and never taught me at all as I remember, but just was there to see the model didn't fall over or whatever.

So what years was this, in the sort of, the war wasn't it?

Well it was 1941 onwards. And then the raids took place during...well it was the V-2s and V-1s occurred, and I can remember many occasions drawing the model and then we would hear the bombs approaching. Of course the...I think, curiously enough the V-1 was the one that was called the doodle-bug, and you heard it, then there was this great silence; I found that very unnerving. But the V-2s you couldn't hear and most people found that terrifying, thinking, any moment...but I adored the V-2s, I thought, thank God you don't have the noise. [LAUGHING] I never logically really put two and two together, that you know... [LAUGHING] But I do remember being up there with a model, and the model saying, `I'm not going to go down in the shelter with no clothes on,' so I would stay up there with the model because she didn't want to go down into the shelter, or we went down to the basement or something. But she wouldn't go, so I often stayed up with all that glass waiting for the V-2s, or V-1s to appear.

Did you get better tuition because there weren't many people there, do you think? Or did you get more individual tuition?

It may have been that, but in many many ways there was a very wonderful feeling in London at that time, it was...no, it may have been that everyone was generous and good-natured towards each other. I don't know. I have the feeling that Ruskin would have done his stuff whatever, you know, whatever the circumstances. But it was a time when Myra Hesse was giving concerts at the National Gallery, so I would go Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 39 down there with carrot sandwiches at lunchtime and listen to Myra Hesse. And it was filled with divine young men, because all the free forces of Europe were there and there were all these incredible Adonises wandering around. And of course it was in Soho, and the Gargoyle and the Mandrake and Francis Bacon and Lucian, I was slightly friendly with Lucian, and John Craxton and various people.

Were you a little bit young to go drinking in Soho, or not?

No I wasn't, because you see, when I was there I was 15, and I soon became 16 and 17, well that was exactly the age when one should have been in Soho. And Dylan Thomas was still around then, and people.

Do you remember people like him quite well?

Oh yes, yes.

But I mean did you, I mean, who would you have spent time with, I mean a lot of time with, anyone in particular?

Well no, in the art school there were many of us. I did have two particular friends, one was called Jane Lane who was, both of them have since died, the other was Anne Greenhalgh, they were particular friends. But there were a group of people in a group of places. And then in the Mandrake and the Gargoyle, I went to the Mandrake more than the Gargoyle, I was very attractive in those days, and there was always sort of response to wherever I went, and so it was, you know, one was part of, you know, like a club almost [INAUDIBLE]. And then, Robert Buhler's mother had a coffee house around the corner, and one went to that. But there were these...

Did Ruskin take you to it.?

No, I just went to it.

Presumably Buhler wasn't teaching at St Martin's?

No, he wasn't teaching, but his mother had the coffee place. I didn't meet him then, in fact I didn't meet...I think I probably met him at the...I don't know, I didn't often... But anyway I certainly met him at the College later, but I think I had known him a bit, not well, earlier. And Ruskin didn't go to those Soho places that... But the people Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Page 40 who did were, you know, marvellous to be in their company. And Francis. I don't remember Francis till later but I certainly remember Lucian. I mean Lucian took me up to...the church was bombed but two towers were left, so, one dreadful day, he dragged me to the top of these towers and then when we got there he leapt over this huge gap and then he said, `Jump'. So I said, `Listen, I can't possibly jump over that.' And he said, `Think you're on the sort of escalator at Selfridges.' [LAUGHS]

And did you jump?

Yes.

End of Track 3: Tape 2: Side A Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 41 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B

But Sandra, I mean, a beautiful young girl, they must have all been trying to get you into bed.

But everyone was a beautiful young girl then. I mean all the girls were beautiful young girls that I knew, you know, if you know what I mean.

Yes, but wicked people like Lucian Freud.

Well Lucian, I think Lucian suggested, I think I went back to his place, but he was very...my memory of it isn't clear, but I certainly didn't have sex with Lucian, and he was perfectly friendly when I said I didn't want to, with him.

Right.

I mean you know, he behaved well about it. But we did go around a bit. And then he would...he has this thing of appearing behind a pillar or somewhere and standing there and then darting these looks across. So, there was this exchange, and dashing looks, darting looks going backwards and forwards.

Were you aware of him as a painter? I mean would you have seen anything?

Well I knew he...I didn't see works that affected me of... And I think, I didn't see his work in his studio, I think I went there briefly, and I think I obviously would have seen his works at exhibitions. But although I admired it, it didn't turn me on in wanting to paint like it, or be influenced.

If you had started sort of looking at things when you were going to Kenwood and the Iveagh Bequest, I mean, had you been going to the National Gallery? What things had you been looking at?

Well when I went to the art school I don't think I looked at anything. I think if I went to the Kenwood, which I must have, I didn't really see them as paintings that I might paint like or to get something from to paint with, at that time. I didn't think of myself as a painter, or being a painter. And so it was like looking at a tree or something, or being, you know, it wasn't, didn't have significance.

But did it strike you as being beautiful? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 42

I really can't remember, so if I can't remember it must mean it didn't. I was more affected by landscape and by what happened in it, and...

But you didn't start painting landscape?

Well I did. I remember, I can remember an early painting of the oast-houses, but I can't remember anything else I did. I mean later I can remember the sort of landscapes I painted, but, I don't even know which sketches she liked that she saw of mine. I do remember once we had to draw or paint at Northwold Road school, I think it was an army scene or something, or camps. I don't even know if it was my painting or somebody else's that I can remember, but... Nothing great or revealing happened about being a painter in those years.

So did it kind of take you by surprise that you were at art school in a sense [INAUDIBLE]?

No, it was...when that remark was made, it had an extraordinary effect on me that remark, because I suddenly felt enormously excited by the idea of it. So, it must have...there must have been something there to respond in that way. And immediately I wanted to do it.

It made sense?

Yes, it was exciting, it was something I passionately wanted to do. And then when I went there it was really like being in paradise, it was, as I said, it was just...I remember the pleasure, the thrill all the time of, like extraordinary delight in what happened when you drew, and all the things you discovered and could work from.

So would you have been drawing in pencil or charcoal or...?

I think pencil, yes pencil.

And then also using oil?

Yes. Smallish oil. With these dark grounds.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 43 And are there any exhibitions, I mean are there any painters that you began to look at more?

Well I suppose I did become very aware of Sickert. I went to the National Gallery, I don't think the pictures were there when I...I think they were in store.

They brought out I think, from what I remember they were bringing out one or two, but they also had contemporary young artists that were showing.

I don't remember that, I just remember the piano[??]. I did go to an exhibition of Picasso's, I think that was after the war.

'45.

Yes. And it didn't mean anything to me at all, I couldn't understand it. But you know, it had some effect but a strange one of bafflement in some way. I don't know, I can't think of any at that time, apart from Sickert, I can't think... And also there were lots of exhibitions, I think in Leicester Square there was still a gallery called Brown and something, there was a...

The Leicester Galleries?

The Leicester Galleries, and...

Run by Mr Brown.

Yes, yes.

Oliver Brown.

Yes. I mean I frequently went there, and I went to the Redfern, and the Cork Street galleries. But it was the bookshops really that were the great interest at the time, because there were all those... And they had very often paintings up, not often but there was one, I think it was called Better Books perhaps, but I think, they used to show Matisse I think, which you could get for about £300.

Wasn't there a Matisse in the Mandrake Club?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 44 There may well have been, I think there were...I can't remember that again clearly. You see what happened with me was, at St Martin's there was a structure, you went there every day and you had something to do, and there was a model and then all the anatomy, whatever, and what I did find was when I left St Martin's I really felt very lost, I didn't feel, I didn't know how to organise my working day, and I didn't really quite know when I was on my own without the model stuck in front of me, what to do. And that was in, I left St Martin's in '46 I think, I was there five years, '41 to '46, I went on to the Academy Schools which I hated.

Why?

Well, they were very dingy in those days. They have been transformed since, but they were cold and dark. And there was a teacher there, I think Dring, William Dring, who actually said to me, `You nauseating female; you should be able to take one inch of your painting and go up to the model and not know the difference.' And he said, `You're just like Ethel Walker.' And I thought Ethel Walker was a wonderful painter, I really liked Ethel Walker paintings. I don't know, I thought, what am I doing here? And then, by just chance, I hadn't been there the full year, I must have gone in October I suppose and I was there till the summer holidays actually, and then I decided to go to Italy for a holiday, and I went down to Milan first and then I went on to Rome. And I had heard of the Piazza di Spagna, so I found a pensione at the top of the steps, which, just after the war it was very easy to sort of get accommodation. And it was wonderful then because there was hardly any traffic, and it was almost like being back in ancient Rome in one respect, the piazzas were practically empty, no Japanese tourists. And people doing natural sort of, you know, artisan things, and builders, they all... Everyone looked...I do remember the builders with things round their heads, they looked really mediaeval, the people who were, you know...

Not handkerchiefs, you mean hats?

Some sort of band they...well the hats or something round their head.

Flat[??], sort of...

Yes. With a band round the front. I'm not quite sure how...but I suppose to protect their hair, but they did look mediaeval to me. But the first week I was there, in the pensione there was someone else staying there called Tony Musarra, who was an opera singer, and we talked, we got...and he said...I said I was a painter, and he said Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 45 he knew a painter, would I like to meet him? And that painter was Nicholas Carone, who had been a student of Hans Hofmann. All that's in the Sackler catalogue. But he was working in Via Margutta, and he both...he was painting abstract pictures, and to begin with I saw... I never had an affair with him, but we liked each other's company, and he talked to me for about...he's a wonderful talker and teacher, and he just talked about abstract, he never stopped talking. But he was talking to me about his paintings, and suddenly I saw what he was talking about; he was talking about spatial movements in paintings. And I suddenly saw that one patch of colour was doing something to another. It just came clear to me what he was saying. So I said to him, `Ah, I've got it.' So that's...and then, having talked to me for a week, he said, `How did you know that?' I said, `Because you've been telling me about it.' Anyway, I had got what he was talking about, I understood spatial movement with colour. And then Alberto Burri had a studio at 51 Via Margutta, so I was introduced to him, and then he became my first lover, and I was associated with him for a year whilst I was there, I stayed for a year in Rome. And then, he was wonderful to... I found Italy amazing, because I had...I had seen lots of paintings before, I went to Milan then to Florence then down to Rome, and I also saw in Florence those wonderful sculptures in the piazza that, the Donatello and those. And I was having a marvellous time before I met him, but it was a great revelation meeting him and his work. And then, he took me down to Sicily, and we looked at things all the way down, and all the time we were travelling, when we stopped he would do these wonderful little gouache paintings, and I sort of saw how he worked and what they looked like as he was doing them, and that was a great education.

Were they representational?

No, they were abstract. No, they appear in lots of his books of his work, but they were exquisite, and the way he, the notes of colour and the spaces. So it was... And then, he took me to look at things that I wouldn't have found on my own, and everywhere we went he showed me works and would talk about them and say, `Look what that's doing.'

So, what sort of things?

Well he would say, `Look at that bit of colour there, tut!,' you know, see how it affects the balance, or whatever.

But not in an abstract painting, you mean in a Renaissance painting? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 46

Oh yes, we saw...it was an extraordinary education, a mixture of the Renaissance and abstract art, and the two to me became kind of joined, and I looked at Renaissance art...I mean I had...but I could see it in a spatial way, I was very interested in what the spaces were doing in it, and all the movements and the way the colours were used, as well as the marvels, you know, of what it was expressing. And then we went back up through...

Was he from Sicily?

No, he was from Umbria, and he lived in Città, was born in Città di Castello, and his mother was still alive in those days so we went to see his mother in... And also his friends, Beppi Guzzi and lots of... But he also knew, well we all knew in Via Margatta people like Guttuso and Dorazio. And then we went hunting, or we went up to a hunting lodge in the mountains. It was very important to me that trip because, we got lost. And I found the path, and to me that was very significant, because he was the native of the place but I managed to find the path. And then, we then went to Venice, and wherever we went we would see works together, so he would comment on what we were looking at. So I both had the experience of watching his work and also his work in the studio, because those were small things he would do when we travelled but in the studio he was doing his large works, and his method and what he would choose to do. And also the works we saw together I saw in a particular way because of him. So it became a kind of basis to work on, a wonderful basis. And that was another... I mean my early years were wonderful, of St Martin's and then Italy.

When, to go, just to recap for a moment, when you were at St Martin's were you still living at home?

Yes, I lived at home most of the time I think, because I did leave home when I was, I think, although I think I was at home until I left St Martin's. So I was going from Golders Green, getting the bus each day, and going back, and in fact very often because of Soho I would stay out quite late, and also sometimes, because you couldn't get home, the tubes would not run and the people were sleeping...

They were sleeping down there.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 47 Were sleeping down there. But I would often get home when my father was going to Spitalfields, and we would pass, I would be going up to bed and he would be coming out, and he would say `Good morning' on the stairs.

Didn't he get cross about that?

No, you see his upbringing was like that, and they...of course at the age of 5 he was going out selling lemons, you know, and so, and going to music halls, so I think it was easier for him to accept. And the other thing...

Even though you were a girl?

Yes. Because they had...they really had a sort of trust in me. And the great fear would have been that I would become pregnant, but they sort of felt that I wouldn't, that I would know how not to, and they never said anything to me but they did... I mean once I was almost, I was shocked by their trust in me, because when I...I think, when one could get out of England when the war was over I think I went over to France or somewhere, and then I ran out of money, and I had an awful job to get back, and I kind of had about a ha'penny on me when I got back, I couldn't believe that I had actually got back home. And I got back, I said, `Ah, God! I didn't think I'd get back. Weren't you worried?' I said to them. And they said, `No, no, we knew you would get back.' Not at all what you would have thought. But they just thought I could make it somehow, which gave me a lot of confidence that they had such confidence.

Did you go off on your own?

Mm.

This didn't seem unusual, to you or to them?

No. No because I think simply, looking back I can only think it was because of my father's upbringing and where he was on his own at the age of sort of 7 he was out there, you know, going to places.

And you would have gone to Paris, what, to look at pictures, or just for fun?

I think just to look at Paris. Yes, one was interested in Europe and so on. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 48

Well you had been starved of it, you couldn't get there.

Yes, exactly.

During the war, presumably.

Yes.

So when you went...

I did travel on my own, I was...I didn't need, have to go with someone. I went to Italy on my own.

I would have thought it was quite unusual, you see, I was going to ask you that, I mean I would have thought that was quite unusual.

It seemed natural to me to do that. It did seem natural, I don't know why. I do remember at the age of 14 I used to go for walks down on the farm, and always again on my own, but I do remember when I was 14 I really had a great sensation that I was liberated and I could manage on my own, that somehow I felt I was no longer a dependent, that I had my own, I could do it on my own. I do remember very much being pleased with that at 14.

So when you went to Rome and you met Nicholas Carone...

Yes.

What nationality is he?

He was an American Italian.

So he had...

He was a GI who had one of the GI grants, but his family, his origins were Italian, and he speaks Italian. Like Kitaj he was on a grant.

And he trained with Hofmann. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 49

Hofmann, yes.

When?

I don't know the exact dates. I met him in '40...the end of '47, '48, and he must have been, what was he then, I think he was probably, certainly about 30 or something.

Before the war then?

So if he was 30 it was...the Americans didn't come in right away.

No, it was early in the war?

Yes. Presumably. I don't know exactly which years. But anyway he did apparently.

And you met Burri through him?

Yes. Because they were working, they had studios quite close. His was next to Fazzini who, I don't know if he's known in this country but he was, they both greatly admired Fazzini and he was a lovely man, Fazzini. He was a sculptor and did little...he used to sit there talking and doing little wax with a flame, little wax figures. Lovely.

So this was a kind of, wholly different atmosphere for you, I mean with, suddenly in a Mediterranean country surrounded by artists in studios.

Well, in a funny way it was an answer to a prayer in a sort of way, because I had had great difficulty, as I've said, when I left the art schools of what to do and how to structure my day, what to actually work at, because I didn't have a model, and I suddenly, I had to do something, and I didn't really quite know what to paint or what... And I wanted to do something of my own, and it was quite a problem. And so in a funny way it was almost a cop-out that this thing occurred which fascinated me, which I was excited by, but which was a way, you know, of being an abstract painter. But again it was just pure chance, I don't know if I would have thought of it if I had stayed in England.

So did you do your first painting then, abstract painting then in Rome? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 50

No, what I did in Rome, I had to get a soggiorno, because you couldn't just stay there after the war, and I had to go to an art school, and very kindly Philip Connard of the Royal Academy endorsed this, so I got a year soggiorno and I had to attend the Accademia di Belle Arte where I once again was drawing from the model. But, I did lots of, again sort of landscape things, but, no, not landscape, town, I drew, I had sketch-books of bridges, you know, in Rome and so on, I drew... But I never attempted abstract painting in Italy, and I didn't... Also, although I was learning about it all the time I didn't want to do it there and then, and I distinctly felt at the end of the year when I had to go back anyway, that I wanted to take everything I...I wanted to take it back to my own roots, to my own... I felt London was my home, and I wanted to take it back to where I lived to sort it out. And so I didn't do any there.

So it was really a year of learning?

Yes.

Rather than practising much.

Yes. I kept my hand in in drawing but I didn't try to do abstract painting.

And what sort of work was Burri doing, could you describe that?

Yes. He was using notes of colour, and sometimes he used stripes, but with them he used a very fine line and the line was very important, and where the line divided the spaces on which, the space that he was working with. And so this very beautiful fine line would define areas, and then the notes of colour would then be placed at some point, either near the line or within the area, that would then relate to each other, and where the notes were there was a sort of, another space between the colour. So it was a mixture of line and quite often striped colours but dots of colour or little splashes of colour. So it was a harmony of two sorts of movements or divisions.

Very delicate?

Delicate, but also incisive and very accurate, very good eye, a very elegant...

What sort of person was he?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 51 Well, we couldn't really...he was quiet, a quiet, comparative...

Did you speak Italian by the way?

I spoke Italian then. He then didn't speak English. I, when I first went to Rome, or, I didn't start to live with him immediately, although we, I think we began to have an affair fairly soon after I met him, but I lived with an Italian family after my first week in a pensione, Ferrari I think they were called, Gina Ferri, you know, the mother was Gina and there was Anna - not Anna, Alba, Alba was the daughter I think. But they spoke entirely Italian, and I remember one wonderful day when someone said, `Chiudi la porta' and pointed to the door, and I knew that `Chiudi la porta' was the door, close the door, could someone close the door. So, that was my first kind of, you know, connection. And then, I used to use lots of English words shoving an o on the end, chocolato; it usually worked or some... [LAUGHING] Anyway...

But did you speak enough to talk to...?

Mm, because I was then, I mean these were the very...I then began to be able to have conversations with them, and you know, if you're there they're saying, `Buon giorno' and you want to say hello, so it comes along. And I think I also, I had had a smattering of Latin, and so I could...I used my Latin, what I could remember, so that was useful. And yes I could, I spoke to Italians, you know, I made...I even remember making a joke to Alberto, which was, he told me a joke about, it wasn't much of a joke. Well someone told us a joke about a man who was thought to be dead and he kept coming to life and saying, `Giuseppe, dari un bicchiere di acqua,' which as you know is, `Give me a glass of water'. And we had a spider in the bath, and we didn't know if it was alive or dead and I said to...I was certain... `Lui dari un bicchiere di acqua'. Which was my first Italian joke. [LAUGHING]

You were going to describe him. You said he was quite a quiet companion.

He was quiet, and he had been a doctor before, and he was kind of, had a reticence about him. And he rather disapproved, and we once, when we went to Sicily and there were some noisy soldiers who tried to get a seat, but there weren't, and he absolutely wouldn't allow them to. And he had actually - I hope this doesn't stain his memory, but I think he greatly admired Mussolini, because during the time that Mussolini was, you know, in charge or in power, I think Italy was very well behaved and clean, and I think he enjoyed that. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 52

Made the trains run on time.

Made the trains run on time, and wouldn't let people sit and all these things. But he wasn't really sort of, you know...he was permissive about one's behaviour as long as it wasn't outrageous.

Had he been in the war?

Yes, he had been in fact in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas, and it was there that he began painting, because he had been a doctor previously. And so...

Did he do those bandage things?

Mm? He did burnt surfaces and he used sacking, and sewing, yes. I don't think he actually used bandage, but they were...

They look like.

But they look like bandages, yes, that's right.

I mean I would have thought that...

Were torn and things.

...fits in with the doctor thing really.

Yes, and with sewing, I'm not sure if he was a surgeon or not, anyway, but I don't think he...he got women to sew it for him I think, the sort of big sewing [INAUDIBLE]. It wasn't, looking back it was really, I think, a professional interest, because he was avidly interested in what he was doing, and so was I, and I had far more...I envy now those days because of the, you know, compulsion to work, and so we were both under a compulsion to work. And I loved what he did, and he seemed to...and also I was rather beautiful and he found me attractive, and I...so that, I suppose, the fact that I was interested in what he was doing and looking at things, and he was very, I think, kind to me in that he showed me so many things, because I don't think on his own he would have taken off the length and breadth of Italy to look at Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Page 53 things. And so, he took me to... And then there was a great experience for us in many ways, all the things we did en route and so on.

Did you fall very much in love with him?

No, it's...I didn't. It was a most curious affair in its way, because it was..it wasn't...the emphasis wasn't on romance; it was on an attraction between us, and it was romantic, but really the fundamental thing was work, and that was attractive, that made him enormously attractive to me. And I think that gave us that, you know, what, our bond as it were.

You say you didn't live with him to begin with, then you did move in together?

I think from...I can't... We didn't really share a house, although I did think... Yes, it's awful, I don't think I went... To begin with I was living with the household I've described to you, and he came there in fact, and they were very disapproving of our relationship because they said he ought to marry me or something, and he did in fact, he thought I was pregnant at one time and then he said, `Prendiamo la bambina', so, or `un bambino, whatever you say. But he wanted me to have a child, but I...I wasn't pregnant; I thought I was but I wasn't, so it didn't really come up. But, I have a feeling I did live with him in '51, but again, it wasn't an overriding, it wasn't like an affair and everything we did was vivid to me; it was what the painting was about and looking at things that was really the sort of great interest. And then, somehow, because I was so young, or, well I wasn't so young, but, it was all part of being alive and being in Italy somehow. And I think...it's very hard to think of it in terms of romance in a way, it wasn't...

So it wasn't that difficult to go back to England in a sense?

No. In fact, no it wasn't, and he did come to England, he visited me in England, and he had a romantic idea about Scotland so we went to Scotland together.

End of Track 4: Tape 2: Side B Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 54 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A

We went to Scotland, and he had another sort of dream fantasy about being a hunter. He had a friend called Beppi Volpe, and I do remember him saying, `Oh if only Beppi Volpe was here with us now,' because, he loved Scotland in fact. And he did some paintings, he painted over one of my... When we came back to London I had a, I think probably a 4 x 4 or 3 x 4 painting, and he worked over it, but some of my painting shows through it, and that's...

Have you got that?

No, but it's in one of the books, one of his books. But I do remember one time he did say that painting was more important to him than I was, and I said, well that's the same with me too, painting is more important, so we kind of acknowledged that. But there was, we were very attracted to each other and there was a sort of love affair, but that wasn't the predominating thing really.

I wondered if he had been keener on you than you were on him.

It seemed to be about equal really, because I think at that time I was so really obsessive about painting, and there was such a compulsion and joy in it and excitement about it that - which he too, it was early days for him, so we were both kind of, he was discovering and developing his style, and we were perfectly matched in a certain way, although I wasn't painting so he couldn't learn about painting from me, but I think he enjoyed sharing it all, the fact I was into whatever, it was the dynamic. And it was wonderful for me to see Italy with him and what we looked at and what he did. And also in the company of the other people we met there. Corrado Marca-Relli was there as well, not as often as the others.

Who's that?

He's quite a well known American Italian painter, and his style, he was an abstract painter. So I saw other abstract paintings there at the time.

So you were there from '47 to '48.

Yes.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 55 And then you came back to London, or...?

I came back to London, and then, I then began to try to work out a style of my own from what I had seen, and I found that unbelievably difficult.

And did you stay in touch with Alberto?

Oh yes, well when he came to Scotland and to London afterwards.

But there was a break?

Yes, I mean he would perhaps come once a year and I would go there, there was a, we kept... And we wrote. They were very sweet letters, God knows, I don't think I've still got them, but we wrote frequently to each other. We had had a real affair but it was a sort of, as I say, the emphasis was on our work.

Yes, but there wasn't a break as such, you continued...?

No it wasn't goodbye forever, no, we continued. In fact the shoes I've got on now, they've fallen to pieces but, I went there, he died last year, but I went there about ten, within the last ten years and he bought me those shoes.

How sweet.

Mm.

I mean did you keep friendly with him all the time then?

Oh yes, and he was delighted to see me. But he did, he married an American... I didn't want to get married at that time.

Did he ask you?

At the time he thought I was pregnant he did think, I'm not sure if he actually said, `Shall we get married,' but he did want me to have the baby, and knowing him, if we had had the baby then we would have stayed together with it. But I didn't want to marry, I really was obsessed by work then, and I knew that if I married I wouldn't work properly. And I didn't want to. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 56

Did you see it as a clear choice between marriage and children and art?

I did, very clearly. I mean nowadays one wouldn't, but then, then, some women did manage it but I...knowing my nature I felt I wouldn't concentrate fully. And I did have a great need in those early twenties to form something of my own, and I could not have done both at that time. I think in my early thirties, when I felt I had established a sort of way to work, I then very much wanted children and I was really... And then, I didn't meet anyone who I...I did want the child to know the father. And again nowadays one wouldn't, not to that extent, but then I did, and I didn't meet anyone who I wanted to be the father. It was sad really, at the time.

A question of timing isn't it?

Timing. It's luck. Time and chance is [INAUDIBLE].

So you came back to London whilst keeping your relationship in a sense going with Alberto.

Mm.

And, did you set yourself up on your own, or did you go back home?

Oh no. I then took various different places to live in. One was in Percy Street, the first one, with a woman called Jane Ainley who, and then it was still the remnants of Bloomsbury were around then, and one met people who had been connected with Bloomsbury, and I think Jane's parents were.

When you said you knew Dylan Thomas, would you have known him well, I mean to talk to and so on?

No I didn't. I mean I once remembered him saying when he was drunk that my hand was like a tin of salmon. [LAUGHING]

What's that supposed to be? It doesn't sound very kind.

I don't know, he was very drunk.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 57 Your hand was like a tin of salmon, I think that's rather good.

[LAUGHING] Probably I had paint all over it, I don't know.

Probably. So that was the most poetic utterance you got out of D.T. But, you were on the sort of fringes of that sort of Soho set then?

I wasn't on the fringes, I was actually in it.

Yes, well, in it, yes. Were people like Colquhoun and MacBryde still around?

Yes, well, I found them so boring.

I expect they were.

Oh, they were always drunk, and when they weren't drunk they were boring. I know other people loved them and got on well with them but I...and I didn't like their work, so... They were there though, in evidence, yes. And they were attractive, they were attractive.

And there must have been, as you say, Bacon you think you knew later.

I knew more, I think, I'm sure he was around, but the only connection really at that time I had with him was Lucian, and John Craxton I adored, and I had a friendship, and they were sort of vaguely affairs really, but, well I don't suppose... Because they weren't sex but they were very affectionate, and there were a lot of people I seemed to know at that time who I had very affectionate friendships with. And John Craxton was one; Lucian was less so, I hardly ever saw Lucian really, but for a short while, perhaps there was a sort of get-together, but it was very brief. But it was always this flashing eye bit going on. And he now, I think the last time I saw him was on one of my birthdays and he wished me many happy returns, and that was quite nice. But there were very affectionate friendships with all sorts of people at that time. But my first lover was actually Alberto when I was 22, which is a bit late nowadays but it wasn't then.

And so when you came back, did you pick up on all that again or did you...?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 58 Oh yes, because, I was very good-looking and I was frequently asked to dinner parties, and I was a friend of Roland Penrose and invited down there, and so I...I did really have, you know, quite, in the art world lots and lots of, both Soho and, the ICA began in 1950.

Yes. How did you meet Roland?

Roland. Well, one of my friends at the art school I mentioned, Jane, Jane Lane, she married a millionaire called Howard Sadler, he was a property millionaire, and they had...she was very beautiful and they had, they entertained a lot, and Jane was a friend of Roland's, I met Roland through Jane. And then he lived near, he lived in Downshire Hill at that time and I think for a while, it must have been whilst I was still living in Golders Green, so, I often went over there, and then at some time later I was invited down to Sussex and stayed the weekend there. And he bought my first abstract painting that I sold, Roland, it was very nice. And then the ICA, and then sort of one saw him there, in 1950.

Did you start going to that?

Oh yes, it was wonderful. I mean, no, then one did see Francis, and David Sylvester, and Hamilton, you know, Richard Hamilton.

And Herbert Read presumably.

And Victor Pasmore. What?

Herbert Read as well.

Yes, yes. I didn't become friends with him but he was there, and he... There was...it was absolutely...it was in Dover Street and nothing, it was a lovely house, old house, and they had all sorts of talks and lectures and, it was all so fascinating going there.

Really it was more like a club.

Exactly, it was like the Chelsea Arts Club but only art, but the sort of people you would love to be in the Chelsea Arts Club. And it was such fun, and it was so interesting. And Roland was filled with enthusiasm. And I met Lee of course, his wife, Lee Miller. And then I also knew a man who was another of what I call my Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 59 affectionate friends, but, John Hayward his name was, and he lived with T.S. Eliot, and he was paralysed.

In a wheelchair wasn't he?

That's right. And so I frequently went to see him, because he liked my company too, and so, they were... It was really wide open then.

So you had these people in the literary side as well, I mean...

Yes.

You didn't still think of yourself as wanting to be a writer, you had given all that up?

Well no I hadn't given it up, it was always there, and I always loved... I do wish I had...sometimes I truly, I think...I don't think I've got all that much talent. I find... I was very surprised once to read an article by Lucian where he said that he...you know, it's very difficult, he has to...the painting for him is very very difficult, and he didn't think he had natural talent, that it was something he really had to work hard at. It did ring a bell with me because that's how I feel. I think people like Hockney don't have to think, you know, you just put a line down and another one and it works. And I do have to think. And I often thought I should have tried to be a writer, it would have probably been much more natural to me.

Sylvester said somewhere recently that he thought Freud was a natural writer.

Yes.

Not a painter, not a natural painter.

Yes. Well...

It sounds the same with you.

Yes I don't know if...I never thought Lucian thought, or whether Lucian thinks of himself as a writer. But I did actually, I did love words and I would have... I don't know if I would have been any good but it was something I regretted not trying to...

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 60 But you didn't sort of try and write poetry or stories or anything?

No I never tried to write a story, but I did write some poems, I don't think they're very good.

When?

Throughout my life, bits and pieces. But...

You've never published any of them?

No, and I don't think they're publishable. I think I...if I make an effort I can write good letters. Again...anyway...

But you did, you were writing to Alberto presumably.

Well I was writing it in my soppy Italian.

Oh of course.

Because he was writing to me in Italian, yes.

He didn't speak English, couldn't read it.

No, not till he married...I can't think of her name but she was an American ballet dancer, or, dancer, yes. She had red hair apparently. And she didn't, obviously didn't think marriage would interfere with her career, in the way I did.

No.

But I knew that it was going to be quite a hard struggle for me to get my own ideas, and I knew that with Alberto, who was, you know, had arrived really and was very formed and very talented, it would be very difficult to be with him and develop my own.

You thought you would be overshadowed?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 61 Absolutely, you know, I really wanted my own space, my own country, my own atmosphere to work out something. I didn't know if I could do it or not but that's, I felt I had to try to do that.

Mm. Just to recap on John Hayward, what was he like?

He was...it was lovely to talk to him, he was very interesting and very funny and would talk in a way that fascinated me really. I don't know what... We just talked about this and that, just sort of people we knew, or things that were happening. I don't think it was literary in the sense he talked about literature.

Did you meet Eliot?

No, I always knew of him in the corridor. [LAUGHING]

Perhaps that was the place for him. So those were sort of things that were going on as well, but, so you got back and you lived in Percy Street.

I lived in Percy Street.

And you started, did you paint there or did you separate studio?

I tried to paint in Percy Street. No, I had a bedsit sort of at the top of the house, and there was a girl from South Africa who had the one below me. And I liked, Jane was an odd creature. You see, they were part of what I call my English life, because she was very English, Jane Ainley, and as I said connected her, people she knew and her parents I think, with the Bloomsbury set or whatever. And so, that, you know, the thing about being Jewish was really, the people who were interesting to me, except the Jews amongst...and I mean David Sylvester was a Jew. He even suggested once we ought to get married to please both our parents. [LAUGHS] It wasn't very romantic. And he used to come to my house, my father adored him, in plimsolls, because he was always rushing around, David, and we played tennis together. And he came down to Paddock Wood in fact and played tennis, kind of called down. But, I was out once and he rushed round the house in Golders Green and he put ticks or crosses on all the pictures I had up to say the ones he liked. [LAUGHS]

So you went back there to work?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 62 I can't work it out now, because I was still...when I began to paint, when I came back from Italy, part of the time some of the very early works were done there; that's when I got the paint on the blanket. And that must have been in sort of, some time in '49, because what...in '48, '49 and '50, I stayed in Italy for a year from '47 to '48; then in '49 I went to Spain for three months and I think in between...

With Alberto?

No, on my own I went to Spain, and I went there...it didn't really...it wasn't very good in terms of painting, although I did go to the Prado and Toledo to see the El Grecos, but in my own work it didn't take me very far, but it was enormously interesting and fun to be there, and it was, you know, an enjoyable, very enjoyable visit. And I think that was about three months. And I had an apartment eventually for about a month in the Alhambra, just below it, I had a balcony which you could see the Sierra Nevada, and just up... And I stayed again with a Spanish family who didn't speak English, and they dressed me up as a Spanish girl and we used to go to concerts in the Alhambra and things like that to see the Gypsies dancing. And there was a soldier, or someone above me, who would throw a rose onto my balcony. [LAUGHS] So that was... I had an amazing experience. When I arrived in Spain, this is not much to do with painting though but, I went...it was very odd, I went to Salamanca on the route down and a young man came over and said - he could speak English, he realised I was English - and then he was charming, he said, was there anything I would particularly like to do that day, and I said, `Well, I always love...I don't ride very well but I love to ride horses'. And he said, `Well we have horses, so why don't you come and ride?' So, we went to this huge car which had two men with black hats in front, and so we just drove off, and then we left the road and we went high up into what seemed like the plains or the mountains, whatever. Anyway we left the road. I thought, where the hell are we going? Anyway, on we went, and we eventually arrived at this kind of finca, and a very distinguished man came out, and then I was introduced to him, and he said, `Will you have tea with us? Will you take lemon or milk with your tea?' And he was the Count of Alva, the brother of the Duke of Alva.

Oh wow!

And, he liked me very much, so he asked if I would stay there for a while, and so I stayed up in this wonderful place, and he taught me how to ride and he...we would ride on the plains of Salamanca which are sort of endless. And I had sort of, again I was dressed...he dressed me up with one of those hats and things on my legs. And Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 63 then we...it was amazing riding on those plains because they seemed endless, and then we would see herds of bulls in the distance, and there was a church with a flamingo standing at the top of it, and, it was absolutely... However fast you rode it didn't seem fast because it was so vast, so there was no sense of things rushing by you. And then he taught me how to get on and off the horse. And then he introduced me once, we went somewhere with a group of people and I was supposed to go, and I fell off my horse and he was furious. [LAUGHS] Anyway...

There's a marvellous photograph of you on the back of a motorbike.

Well that was Agustín, that was his son. The boy who took me up there was...and that was Agustín's motorbike.

So you went roaring around on a motorbike on your own?

No, I just posed on it. I used to drive behind Agustín on a motorbike but I didn't actually drive it.

I wondered how you got around Italy with Alberto, I mean did you drive?

We went on foot or train. He didn't drive. And we would take trains down to where we were going. And then, we once spent a night in Sorento I think, we walked up to the top and spent a night actually literally in...we slept on straw and, I don't think there were pigs but there were chickens around us or something. And then we walked down a smugglers' path where there actually were smugglers bringing something down, which was quite... Travels in Europe.

Well you obviously were quite cosmopolitan really, I mean rushing around, a lot more than other people were.

Well yes, well I did have a few wonderful years when I left the art... Well I loved the art school and also what happened afterwards, those three years. The only trouble was of forming... And then I went, the third year, which was the last of my travelling years, was France, and I went to stay in Villefranche, and again I was...

When was this, 19...?

1949. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 64

'49.

And then I...I went... There was a French painter called Monsieur Poli who lived there who died, and his widow was glad for me to use his studio, and I stayed with a French family and painted in that studio, which was lovely. And Graham Sutherland was staying nearby. And I spent the summer there trying to work out an abstract way of painting, and was having great, tremendous, it used to make my brain ache thinking how to... And so, I met him, and I said, `Look, will you come and look at what I'm doing? And I really want your honest...and if you think it's just, you know, it's hopeless, just tell me, because I am having great difficulty, and I'm not sure I'm getting anywhere with it.' And so he came, and he said, `No, carry on, it's all right.' So... [LAUGHS]

Had you met him before or was this...?

No, I just met him there.

What did you think of him?

I liked him, he was a very nice man, and I thought he was, you know, very kind to come and look at the work and so on, and encourage me to do it. I both did and didn't like his work; I thought that it was rather extraordinary, and at the time it was more so. I don't think it's lasted. I don't know, I haven't seen it recently, but...

It certainly went out of fashion.

Yes, but it was at that time sort of, kind of of great interest though.

So you were in Villefranche for...

Three months again. I seemed to spend, I think the summer of each of those years.

And was your father sort of helping you pay for this?

Well, that's what's so...

Or was it quite cheap, France, anyway? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 65

No, he was extraordinarily generous, because he...he didn't really like my work, and he didn't...

Did he understand what you were trying to do?

No, and he didn't really want me to be a painter. I think he would have liked me to have got married. But he did also believe I had to be fed, and so he used to really give me an allowance. So I have to thank him too really for...I didn't have to, as people do, you know, work to earn money to paint. And it was sufficient to, especially in those countries in those days, I think you know, not, the pound has gone down since but, in Italy I was rich really compared... So... And then, so I came back to London, then I...for some time...no I didn't move to Montagu Square then, that was a bit later I think. Because I did for quite, in the early Fifties, at some time I moved to Montagu Square and had a basement flat there.

Which is where?

That's near Baker Street, parallel with Baker Street. But in 1950 when I came back the ICA opened, and I think in '51, I thought I had shown in the 50 Years of Modern Art that they opened with...Judith, Judith Bumpus researched that and said I wasn't in the catalogue, but that I was in apparently a show the ICA put on at somewhere else in '51 so it was... I knew I showed with the ICA at some time, one of the first exhibitions I showed an abstract painting in. I think I must have been in Montagu Square because I think it was in Montagu Square that Roland came round to look at my work, and...

For the ICA?

And that's when he bought the one that he bought.

And that was the first one you had done?

No, it was one of...no, the first one I had sold.

The first one you had sold?

Yes, was to him. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 66

So, I mean were you being quite prolific and trying different things at this point?

Yes. I mean it was dreadful, I can't tell you the agony of it, of trying to sort of work out what I should, how I should do it, how the things I had seen could come into it, how it could be mine, how, you know, I could something I felt into it. Oh, nightmares! I wouldn't like to go through that again, it really was painful.

Did you feel you had to justify it intellectually, or was it very much an emotional thing?

No, I think it was a visual and an emotional thing. It was trying to make something visual mean something, to have the context of...the painting qualities which I had during those years been looking at and understanding and making a selection from what I had seen of what I wanted to use, and then how to do it in something that would relate to my own feelings and what I felt was the way I wanted to use those things I'd seen. And I tried, oh! thing after thing after thing.

So was your abstraction very much based on the natural world, the visual world that you had seen?

No, it was really based on abstract painting I suppose; it was based on both, but probably first came... I should think the basis of it was Nicholas's exposition of space, and pictorial space, which really goes back to Cézanne, and what Roger does in his work, you know, of making colours move on the picture surface, of there being a connection between the size of one area and the other to make a balance. But a spatial movement or balance. I'm really...I mean the words `pictorial space' meant everything to me; I don't know if they mean, you know, that to you or to...but it was a sort of movement of colour and line and space that I think were what it all came from. And on that kind of structure, or those movements, I then wanted to put an emotional, some emotional thing, or some thing I liked that I felt was right for me that would use those elements in a way suitable for what I wanted to feel my paintings look like. So, but there was... And I did try all sorts of ideas. I tried thinking of them even as poetry, as a sort of poetic experience, and I tried to think of them in emotional terms, of psychological terms. But I think what really helped me with the formation of what I was doing was the use of material, because I found the materials could kind of speak in a way, or have a presence, and it was through the materials that I could then begin Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 67 to...and also the fact that they had a kind of physical spatial thing, because if they were...there was a sort of relief effect of materials.

What sort of materials are you talking about?

Sacking. It really was taken from Alberto's work. And...

Would you stick it on...?

With glue. And he used something called vinavil, which was a sort of acrylic, you know, and you could glue with it, you could glue things. And I found a firm... It was really a real connection, like the umbilical cord, to Alberto, that there was a firm called Revertex which produced it in... Vinavil was, I could get in England from a firm called Revertex. So I used to use that, and that again was directly from Alberto in every sense.

So do you think your pictures were quite like his?

Oh yes, oh absolutely. I mean Alberto...

He was the major influence rather than anyone else in England who was working?

Oh yes. Well absolutely. I mean the first abstract works that began to give me a look I wanted were using the materials that he had used, not... I mean he used them in a different way, and he used...but the sackings I used were absolutely Alberto, he used sacking. But I began to get a certain formation of the way I would use them, that although taken from him I found satisfactory... You know, one could always tell they weren't his. And so, they were a way in in fact. I mean they were a relief to me because when I tried to put ideas into it, it was very difficult to make the ideas become paint, and...

What sort of ideas, when you say ideas?

Well I can't... Now looking back I know that I tried, at one time I tried to think of them, you know, in poetic terms, and then another of emotional terms, but it was very, I found it incredibly difficult to decide how that would appear in... And I can't think of a particular idea now because they would come, I would have certain themes I would think. But none of those... All I remember really are not the actual images or Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Page 68 the feelings I was trying, but the fact I found it so difficult to translate them, and to make a coherent painting from them using the spatial or the structural elements I just mentioned. So, it was an enormous relief to sort of fall back onto the sacking, which provided a presence of a sort.

End of Track 5: Tape 3: Side A Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 69 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B

What other artists would you have been looking at though? I mean were you aware of other people in England painting along the lines that you were?

Well I mean, you know, well by then I was, you know, back in England working fully and going to exhibitions, and also the ICA was showing all sorts of things. And I do remember when I was in Paris, for the first time I saw a Picasso and saw how it worked spatially in the terms I've just described, which was absolutely thrilling, it was a wonderful painting. It was a very subdued colour with a sort of grey area and some lines, and it was wonderful in the spatial strength of it, you know, the way, the balance of the work. I think Picasso began to...you know, I became very aware. Also Roland was a great devotee of Picasso.

What about Matisse?

No, I didn't... It was only much later, and really in fact it was more the fact he used collage than the works themselves. I never had the great turn-on that other people have had from Matisse. I think Bonnard was much nearer to what I felt was a colour sensation, the use of colour.

And what about English painters, I mean someone like Victor Pasmore for instance, were you aware of him?

I was aware... Well I then...the other thing... Three very important things happened really. One is, in 1951 I suppose it was, when I had begun to...and they weren't...I wasn't then using the sacking, that was the earlier ones in that when I was still struggling. However, I thought I had begun to get something into them, and I took a taxi one day and without knowing them I decided, I thought I would show them to some galleries, and I didn't ring up or anything. You couldn't do it nowadays - well perhaps you could. But anyway, I rolled up in this taxi in Gimpels.

You had never exhibited anywhere?

No.

Not even in mixed shows?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 70 Well, I was...I think that the ICA was probably the same year I went to Gimpels. No, then I hadn't exhibited. And then...and so I went into Gimpels and said `I've got some paintings in a taxi outside,' and they were very sweet, they said, `Well bring them in or else you'll have an enormous taxi fare'. So I trundled in with these six paintings or whatever they were, and they took me on.

Who was that then?

That was Peter and Charles. And in the end I sort of settled with Peter. And so he...I saw...you know, he would connect me in the gallery. And, I then had a, began to show with them. And then there I met Roger Hilton because he was showing there, and Kenneth Armitage was showing there.

There were lots of people, like, was Lynn Chadwick there then as well?

I think so, yes, that's right, Lynn was there. And I got to know them. And we went to the Biennale, all of us together, one year, which was rather, it was a bit later on. But we became friends and I became friends with Roger, and I didn't know him then but Gwyther was showing there then, Gwyther Irwin. And then of course one went to, being in London, to everything that was going on, including the ICA, so there was a lot of surrounding work to look at. And a lot...and the Gimpel showed my work all over Europe, in Holland and France and so on, and so I, one got to know the French painters. I never really liked the French painters but I, you know, one knew what they ere doing. But then something else happened which did come into the work is that, it's a ludicrous story really but, when I was living in Golders Green I fell in love with a very handsome doctor who lived opposite who had been away in the war some time, Eliot, Eliot Emanuel his name was. I was crazy about him, and he came back, and we were going to go off together, and suddenly we both panicked, and thank God, he went to Ireland and I went to Italy, and thank God I did, otherwise I would never have met Alberto. But then he left England and he went to Canada, and he was a psychoanalyst, he became, or was, anyway, he was a practising analyst. And then, I was...I was very sort of sorry to have...and so I wrote to him, I said I felt sure I needed psycho... [LAUGHING] Oh God! But anyway...

In Canada?

Well he said that if I thought that I should go and talk about it to somebody he knew, who in fact I think was quite...Dr. Wonnacot who I think is quite well known actually. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 71 But I think... And then I saw another man. But they said all right, if I want to be psycho-analysed, and that they recommended a man called Dr Anderson.

And you really felt that you did want to talk to them?

Well I felt that it would interest me, yes.

That it would help the work?

Yes, exactly. And so I went to Dr. Anderson, and in fact it was to me absolutely fascinating, and...

When was this?

This was probably in '51, about that time. And it did explain enormous, I mean in terms of my family and my upbringing and everything else, he actually...he too was Jewish I think, Dr Anderson, Charles Anderson. But it was of enormous interest, and it did begin to come into the work.

In what way?

Well, he talked of... I now have a picture in the Tate, the large green painting that was in the Sackler, it's 10 x 10. But that was based on the psychological... He sort of spoke of, I became aware of conflicting feelings within oneself, and of a sort of balance, a psychic balance or psychological balance one has within oneself of how there are fears and destructive urges, and there are also the difficulties when you love people and are close to them, of the damage you might do them and the sort of control and balance that has to go on internally, and all the internal fears you have and so on. And, it was Freudian analysis. And so the green picture is really about a psychological balance between, there are two bands coming through it, a cross band, and there's also a line which occurred for another reason in it, which does in fact make balance, but it was simply the two opposing elements in oneself, and the sort of tension and balance. And that tied in very well with my ideas of spatial tensions and balance. So it was deeply interesting to me, that. And another thing came into it, which wasn't directly part, spoken of, during the analysis, but I think occurred because of it, was that I very much wanted to... I think the analysis ended, I was 26, I was 26 in '51, and there was... Yes that's right, '25, that's right; I was born in 1925 so 1950 I was 25, 1951 I was 26, and it went on until I was 31, and then, I was then still Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 72 struggling to, you know, develop a style and work out things in painting, and I still didn't really want to get married, but I did very much want a child, and yet I felt I couldn't have a child yet because I wouldn't certainly not go on painting in the way I felt I would be if I married someone. So, I then deliberately put things, or use...although I had done it with Alberto anyway, I mean it may have been because of that, I used elements of males that I knew into my painting. It's very odd.

In what way?

Well, for example, Alberto's sacking; I was a friend with Roger Hilton and I used charcoal and things he used. So that I was sort of taking elements, and deliberately. And some people would say, `Ah, that looks like Roger,' or someone, `so I won't do it.' It was the opposite with me, because sort of, you know, it was a kind of substitute for having, you know, being with someone and having a child, so... It didn't last long but it did actually occur.

But the actual sort of analysis went on for six years?

It went on until 1956 when Dr Anderson in fact died, unfortunately and sadly, he had a heart attack and died. I think sitting in that chair all those years, you know, he didn't get enough exercise. So it ended, yes, I stopped it then. I didn't go to anyone else.

Did you miss it?

No, I was quite glad. I thought, well now, you know... I mean it was always interesting, and in fact I think one could happily be psycho-analysed for all one's life, because there is someone who is paid to listen to you. You know the way one always has, life always has some sort of problem. Well you bore all your friends to death talking about it, or you feel you can't possibly, or else you don't talk about it because you feel it's unfair to sort of, you know, you've got to work things out yourself. But very often it's difficult to be totally objective about one's own dilemmas and so on, and it's a way of feeling totally free of guilt because you pay for it, and you get, if you trust the analyst, a rather interesting discussion about what you really feel about it, so...

So, you're showing now at Gimpels. What about someone like Victor Pasmore, I mean did you know him, did you...were you interested in his work, or not?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 73 Well, the very...one of the very early exhibitions was, Alberto had a friend who I met when I was with him in Italy called Ettore Colla, who was both a sculptor and had a gallery, and he showed Alberto's work, and he asked if I would ask Victor Pasmore and Eduardo Paolozzi and Robert Adams and myself to show with him. So in the early Fifties we showed together, and that's when I really first connected with Victor, who was hilarious because we had trouble getting the arrangements made for the plane and Victor said, `Oh just wrap them up in a tea towel and send them off'. [LAUGHS] Anyway we got them there.

What sort of influence did he have? I mean it sounds like he was sort of, you know, sort of, when you say that about...

What, Victor?

Yes.

Well he didn't influence... When I first, I think he was still painting those beautiful paintings of, you know, the river and then Wendy and so on. I think he had begun the spirals but, he didn't influence me at all in fact then. But in recent years, he has become an RA, and he wrote me some wonderful postcards about how much he loved my work, and that meant an enormous lot to me, that he liked it, so...

But he wasn't a figure that was important on the scene at that point in the abstract world.

No. Well not to me. I think his spirals and those early abstract paintings did, you know, people responded to them although they were like... But they didn't actually affect my work. The people who really came into my work were Alberto and Roger Hilton. Because he became a friend when I... And then I had a studio in Chiswick, in British Grove behind St Peter's Square.

Oh well that's where Ruskin was.

Oh I didn't know that, I didn't know Ruskin was there. Did he? Was he there?

Latterly he was, in British Grove. That's where I went to see him.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 74 Ah, I didn't know that. Oh dear. No I didn't see him there. But anyway, Roger Hilton would come round frequently to that studio, and then, he saw what I was doing and then we would also go to exhibitions together, and then he liked the chocolate cake in Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch, so we would finish up having tea there. And I also had a studio near him, I saw a lot of him and his family. And then I got a studio next to Kenneth Armitage, behind, in Shepherd's Bush somewhere, it was with an old stable or something. So I was quite friendly with Kenneth. I don't think Kenneth came into my work really but Roger's work did.

What sort of time are we talking about now?

We are talking of the Fifties, and we are probably talking of the...

The mid Fifties or...?

Mid, yes, I would say mid Fifties. No no, the British Grove with Roger was when I... Roger then, in... Sorry, in '57 Roger and I went to the Redfern one day and Patrick Heron was there, and Patrick invited Roger to come down for Easter and Roger asked if I could go too. So we both went and stayed with Patrick Heron. And when I was there, Tregerthen became vacant, Trevor Bell had it and was moving out; it was next to Karl Weschke. And I took what was where Trevor Bell had been living and working, and I used a barn for the bigger pictures.

The cottage?

The cottage, yes, the third cottage. And I stayed there for a year, and then when I came back from there I took British Grove, and that's when the visits, Roger's visits...

So, you met Roger through Gimpel?

Yes.

When did you get closer, sort of after that?

I think probably it was really when we went down to Patrick's, because, I don't think when I lived in Montagu Square... I lived in Montagu Square before I went to Cornwall. I know that I...I went...I lived there for about five years I suppose and then, Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 75 and that was quite near Dr Anderson, and then in '56 I think I showed in the Saidenberg Gallery in New York that Gimpel arranged, or it may have been early '57.

'57 I've got down.

Yes. In that case it was before Easter, but when I came back from the Saidenberg I then went to Cornwall with Roger and gave up Montagu Square, and then came back and took British Grove, and that's when I saw a lot of Roger.

But what was your relationship with him?

Well, again it was friendship and work. We didn't have an affair, but we were very fond of each other, and I was one of the few people he didn't insult ever.

He was a very powerful personality wasn't he?

Yes, he was incredibly rude to people, but it was a form of truth really, everything he said was true. And he was incredibly funny and witty and outrageous. He was just like another Aunt Rose.

But wasn't he very self-destructive, or was that later more?

Well I think what destroyed him was drinking.

Yes. I mean was that apparent when you knew him?

Well he did drink, yes, but not to the extent that he drank later, and it didn't affect him in the way that, very sadly towards the end of his life he was... Because he was mobile and energetic.

Did you drink much?

No. I think when I...then I got a flat; when I got a flat in 1960, I do remember I had a Jeep and I had a whisky hip flask, and I did drink then but never obsessively, and...

Not a lot?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 76 No. And like smoking, I think I smoke about three cigarettes a year, but I occasionally have a cigarette, but I...

1960, where were you then?

Well 1960, it was after British Grove.

After British Grove?

Yes. And then I...I then rented a flat from Rose Hilton. Well she had won a Rome Scholarship, and I was there from '60 to '61 or from '59 to '60, something like that. And I introduced Rose to Roger, and they then, as you know they got married eventually, and so... But I then took a flat... And then the works that I did in that flat, I think one of those, possibly one of those, the Tate bought, that was the first painting they bought of mine. And I had a show in Gimpel in '60 or '61 which contained works I had done in Rose's flat, which were in '60. And that was a period when I had stopped the sacking, and if anything those were influenced by, well they were not influenced by, but contained, it was quite different, he didn't influence my style of painting but I used elements in his painting in mine in that kind of substitute parenthood. It's interesting, I was using the charcoal. I liked it too.

So it was his use of line was it?

I think the charcoal lines were, because he used charcoal lines, I think it was really that. But I think other than that they were my own paintings. It was just that sort of...

Appropriation.

Yes, very funny. I mean I didn't, I haven't since ever done that, but, I do remember thinking of it and knowing... And then, I went to Glebe Place for...I think I was there for, till '61. I thought I was there three years but it doesn't sound as though I could have been perhaps. Because I wasn't there till... Because after that I had found Sydney Close, and I think that was in '61, or '62 perhaps. Yes perhaps I was there sort of '59 to '62, somehow.

But what...I mean you obviously spent a lot of time with Roger.

Mm. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 77

What, I mean would you talk about art all the time, or would you be having fun?

I don't know, he... He used to look at what I was doing, and so we would talk about the paintings, and he would sort of say he liked this or that. He would then show me his work.

Were you allowed to comment on it?

No, he didn't ask for comment.

So it was a bit one-sided, he would tell you what he thought about yours but you weren't...

I wanted to know what he thought about mine.

Yes.

And he didn't care.

Didn't you want to say anything? Oh he didn't care?

No. I think he just, you know, he knew what he had got or hadn't got. He didn't need to have reassurance about that. And I always needed reassurance, I still need reassurance now. But he, I think it was... And then we would look at exhibitions together. But I think it was talking about people or what was happening around us, and he would make comments and sort of give his view of what was being said, or what was happening. And they all sort of, well they were facets of the truth. So he was very interesting, for me anyway, to be with. And he was immensely, you know, I had a sense of someone who liked me a great deal and he was always very kind to me, so... And I liked, just liked the fact that he had in his head those paintings, you know, something was in him that were those paintings, and that way of painting, so that was an exciting connection.

So, did you get to know the Herons through him?

Yes. Well, yes.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 78 Or did you know them previously?

No, I sort of knew of, or perhaps had met, but I mean, when I went that year I was there, that was a very wonderful year, because they were all, a lot of, there were a group of painters there that, there was Patrick, Brian Wynter, Peter Lanyon, and others, but those three, and particularly Peter Lanyon, became friends, and they were, Roger was friendly with all of them. And there was a great, it was the Sixties - well, yes, the end of the Fifties, the beginning of, well the end of the Fifties, but there was a great gregarious sort of party-giving, drinking, visiting between them all, and going, either giving parties or going out to pubs together or meeting, going to each other's places.

Roger wasn't living there, he was living...?

No, he was living...

Would come and visit?

Yes. He went back to London, and I think he reappeared at various times. He was very friendly with Sidney Graham, the poet. But they were all kind of good-looking, in their prime, doing exciting work. It was a very... And also, it was wonderful to be there then, because Ben Nicholson was still there, and Barbara Hepworth, and the countryside was flourishing and there wasn't what's now, you know, an overload of visitors, and St Ives is just a tourist centre, whereas then it was a fishing village, and it was just lovely. And it wasn't congested. And it was a lovely life. And Patrick now, you know, he's not very well and he's also I think quite a recluse and doesn't want to be involved with what's going on now particularly, apart from, I think he is involved with organising various things there, or the Tate, I'm sure he's connected. But you know, the people who are there aren't his generation really and he is not interested I don't think terribly. And he's also reclusive and not very well, so one hardly sees him. And Peter, I saw a great deal of Peter Lanyon, he used to pick me up in his Land Rover and we would drive and talk and see his family. But he was a close friend, and... None of that's there now, people of that, you know, that...

Did you value his work very highly?

No. I loved him...

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 79 [LAUGHING] Sorry, it's just what you said then. Very honest.

I couldn't...I couldn't really get him... I still can't, I know he's sort of thought... There are things that are sort of very free and very of the landscape connected, but they were too disorganised. There is an organisation in them but the type of...it wasn't the type which is... In my work and the works I like you get a very clear reading of where the notes are, what is happening, and I try as much to make it a simplicity in a work. And his was very spontaneous, which I like, but it didn't have...it wasn't organised in the way that... A lot of air and space and spontaneity, and landscape.

Would you have rows about things like that, or would you just sort of steer clear of them?

Well, I think we just liked... In a curious way, I know it sounds crazy, but if I like people's paintings, or if I like the fact that they are painting... I mean, to me, it's almost like a painting experience to be in their company, because even if we're not talking about painting I sort of know it's there in them in some way, and so it's an essence or a presence that I, you know, it's in an area that interests me. And I sort of know that their preoccupations, you know, they're not going to take my mind away from my own preoccupations, because what preoccupies them preoccupies me in a certain way.

What about someone like Brian Wynter, what was he like?

Well, he was a charmer, and he was very, a very good host and always very friendly and pleasant and enjoyed, seemed to enjoy your company. I think most of the times I went up to see him was with Roger, and they were very close friends. And he was taking mescaline or something at the time and Roger took some I think and it was an absolute disaster. He was lying on the ground with a crow sitting on him.

What, Roger was?

Roger was, yes. [LAUGHING] But, I didn't particularly like his work, you know, either, but I liked him.

And did you see W.S. Graham much?

Yes. But I didn't get on well with him. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 80

He was difficult wasn't he?

He was difficult, and he was drunk a great deal. So, although I could see why Roger liked him and why he liked Roger, and I often saw them together, I didn't particularly enjoy his company, although I could understand why other people did.

So Roger wasn't drunk most of the time like...well like Graham was for instance?

Well, he was, but however drunk Roger was he could manage to say something that was coherent and very acute, and a lot of it... And I never got, which would have been infinitely boring, I don't know if I could possibly have seen him, I never got the dreary abuse that, you know, he would sort of, you would hear him...I have heard him speak to people in this monotonously abusive way, which is just offensive and boring. But fortunately he was never like that with me. He used to call me Sanybugs, that was the closest he came to an insult. I got a letter from him, `Dear Sanybugs'. But that's as far as it ever went. And other than that he was just very, very good company.

Who else was there? I heard you say Weschke was around.

Yes, Weschke was my neighbour.

Did you see much of him?

Well yes, we...I mean we did kind of neighbour-swappings, like having... I remember one extraordinary evening was - no it was a morning, it was a Sunday morning, we... As you know they were supposed to be inhabited by D.H. Lawrence and Frieda, those cottages, and we both heard footsteps on the path coming down towards us, and a man and a woman talking, and they went into the middle cottage and we thought, well they're looking for us, so we went out to say we were in the first cottage, and nobody was there. [LAUGHS] It was absolutely... And another time, I was in my cottage at one end and he was in his first, you know, he worked in the middle cottage, and I heard him banging away, I thought he was stretching canvases, and then, he came into my cottage later on and said did I have any cigarettes, and I said, `I heard you stretching canvases'. He said, `No I've been reading all evening, I heard you stretching canvases.' So... We both heard this banging going on. I don't know. But, yes, so, all the time I was there, yes, I was his neighbour. I thought his drawings were beautiful, I loved his drawings. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Page 81

Have you seen the room at the Tate? They've given him a room of [INAUDIBLE] paintings.

Oh really? Oh, no I haven't. Oh, of paintings?

Mm.

No I haven't.

A temporary display.

No I haven't. Pity I can't...yes.

One's from the Sixties, I think the earliest one is '64 or something.

Yes. But, are there any of the drawings there?

No. I've seen some of the drawings but not in...

There are some lovely drawings of animals, of dogs and things, beautiful. Do you like the paintings there?

Mm.

Yes. I don't think I've got time. I'm going back... Anyway, there we are, I might.

End of Track 6: Tape 3: Side B Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 82 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A

There's a great photograph of you taken by Ida Kar in 1955.

Oh yes. No not 1945.

'55.

'55, yes. That...that couldn't have been '55.

That's the date in the book. Well it's striped trousers, look like black and white striped trousers.

Have you got it?

Not the book, but I mean, I have it at home.

I know that she came to Ifield Road when I had Rose's flat, which was 1960, and she took photographs there. I don't remember a second visit from her.

Well, no, this would have been earlier, wouldn't it, '55?

I don't...

They often get dates wrong in these sort of...

Yes. Well, the only... And there's one sitting in an armchair with a sort of jersey, polo-neck jersey on.

I haven't see that one. This is definitely standing up, striped trousers.

How amazing.

In a studio.

I'd love to see it. Oh it's in her book is it?

It's in a book from her by Valerie or something or other. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 83

I see. No, well I have no memory of that so I don't know where...

It's a very chic image, you know, I mean you look very good, and it sort of reminds me of photographs taken around that, or a bit later in fact, of Bridget Riley.

Yes.

Did you know her then?

No, I didn't know Bridget Riley then. I don't think I knew Bridget Riley till much later, till... I think I remember going there, was it with Roger or was it... She gave a luncheon party once. But it wouldn't...I think it wasn't until the Seventies that I actually knew her. I did see her recently in St Ives when she visited, came down.

But she is not somebody you've known or been a friend of or...?

No, she's not, but I've always admired her work. I love her early work.

So do I.

Yes. And, I very much enjoy her company when I do see her. She occasionally has been to the Academy dinners. She's very sparky and very warm and very nice, I think, and brave.

I wondered if there was sort of, you know, kind of, group of beautiful young women who were painters who were sort of, the sort of...

A club of beautiful young women?

Yes. Take the art world by storm.

No, I didn't. But there was one article once in one of the newspapers where, it was about both of us side by side with photographs of both of us, and... I've got a copy of that somewhere.

You mentioned at one point that you felt very much that you were on the frontiers as it were of, in the forefront and it was, kind of the Fifties were, you were bringing Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 84 abstract art to the people, and it was quite an embattled sort of time. Do you think that's right?

Not quite. But I did feel then that it was, certainly in London it was a kind of frontier, but I don't...it doesn't sound to me that I felt I was bringing art to the people, but I did feel it was an unknown, an almost unknown, and that it was exciting to be doing it, yes.

Because in many people's eyes I think abstract art was equated with left-wing politics, partly to do with things like the AIA and so on. Have you ever been politically motivated?

No, I've not in my work. I haven't painted a politically motivated painting.

Are you politically minded?

Well, I'm aware of governments. I also feel governments govern themselves almost; I feel it's a sort of separate thing to what happens in the country. I know that they affect the laws, but I do feel that everyday life and what governments decree should happen are two separate issues, and I feel that in fact there's a great deal more knowledge of how to live and manage one's life outside governments. I just feel governments think they are affecting... They do affect people's lives financially but I sort of feel that it's a separate institution, it's almost a self-contained institution, being in the government, to what people's lives are really like.

Were your parents politically minded?

No. I think...no they weren't. I don't think the ghettos had pol...

Again it's this idea of keeping your head down isn't it I suppose.

Exactly, I suppose so. No they weren't.

So, I mean, you haven't been a member of any particular party or gone to political meetings, or...?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 85 No. I mean I have felt strongly about certain issues, you know, recently very much so, you know, the green, the pollution and everything that one is so worried about nowadays. And the unfairness of lots of things that are happening.

But in a more personal way rather than a party way, yes.

I see it really more as people's lives and things happening which are, you know, impossibly difficult or unfair due to sort of various acts of law and government. But obviously you can't, you know, fit everything that happens under... And what appals me about government is that it's so to do with people's ambition; people who govern are usually ambitious and their really first concern is themselves and their careers.

Absolutely, self-seeking.

Mm.

But then, has any kind of organised religion had any interest for you either?

No, because my first experience of religion wasn't one that made me feel very religious. I do feel much, less so now but at certain times in my life I have felt there's some...well there is a great mystery, and I do have a sense sometimes of forces in the world. And I also because perhaps in many ways, in many cases I have been very lucky in what's happened to me, I feel a sort of benign presence in some way. And I very often look at landscape and feel it can...you know, it can't look like that unless there is a benign presence because it's so wonderful to look at.

Do you think landscape is one of your great pleasures in life?

Yes, landscape is. And at one time there was a particular type of landscape when I was painting or trying to purify or simplify, and I absolutely loved moorland, sort of outlines. And I had a Jeep in 1960 and I would drive it up onto, drive down to Devon and drive up on the moors, and I would tie a four-foot square - I used it as a palette really, to the back wheel, and have paints in the, you know, back part of the Jeep, and park it and tie the picture up and then work on the moors in those outlines. So although they're abstract paintings they have these great spaces around them.

So it wouldn't be in any way an evocation of the moor, but...

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 86 Well it would be a sense of great space, and also sort of great pure lines in them.

Yes, but not any more representational than that?

No no, it wasn't painting moorland and sky, no. But I like to sort of feel something of, you know, that great simplicity, and great space would sort of, the picture could stand against or be part of that in some way.

And in a sense then your art is putting you in touch with this feeling which comes through nature which is in landscapes and through God?

No, I think the reverse. I think nature comes through the art rather than the art comes through... Say it again what you said.

No, I was thinking that your art was in a sense putting you in touch with this feeling which comes from God or whatever you call it, a divine...

Well I think the feeling was there, and then I try to bring it into the art, or use it as a yardstick against the art, so I can sort of feel something of it is in the art, yes.

And were you beginning to experiment with different materials at this time? I mean people think of your work very often with not just sacking but sand and cement and other things, different textures and so on. When did that come in?

Well, I think each...quite often what I've done follows what I've been doing at one stage, is very often either taken from it or kind of changing from it. I did some, having done years of very encrusted, you know, and materials, used the materials in paintings, I then went through a phase when I did...well no, partly because I was really very hard up at the time, but there was almost nothing on the canvas when I did what I call the tea series of paintings when I just used tea and ash from the fire, and...

Oh not cigarette ash? I wondered whether it was...

No, it was...I had a stove in my Sydney Close studio and there was always ash to empty when it was in use, so I used to collect the ash and sprinkle it and sort of get the lumps out of it.

How did it...would it stay on the canvas? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 87

Yes, because I would use...

Fixative or something, glue.

No, I would put PVA on it, and then drop the ash into it.

And how...and the tea, what, stained it?

No, the tea stain would stain the canvas first. It wouldn't stain the glue if I put the glue on, but the ash, the glue would hold the ash. Usually I would think the ash was put over the tea stains, and I would use very thin white bands on whatever areas of colour, or white. So it was this white paint, ash, and tea, and glue. But they were both economically kind of, in a way, necessary at that time, but also it was a reaction against using a heavy thick kind of, with relying on the effects of materials or sacking and painting a picture devoid of a sort of surface.

Don't you like all that sort of material - canvas and impasto?

Well I liked it, but after doing it for so many years I think, I felt I wanted to do something without it really.

So that all came to an end and you didn't do any more thick painting afterwards, it was all thin?

Well I have since then used, had things on the canvas in a different sort of way, because I then, again it evolved after...one was in a way partly to do with economics, but the other was to do with, I quite liked to keep, when I was painting, the large acrylic works. I find very beautiful sort of great washes, pure washes of acrylic paint, and I didn't want to lose the surface. So I would try out forms and colours in collage on the surface to then decide what I was going to do on it without losing the ground, and then very often I would find I liked so much the effect of the relief of the things that then, I would then glue the paper to, I think usually two layers at least, of canvas, so that it couldn't get torn, and then stick the canvas with the collage shape and at the top the paper collage that was then...

I see, you backed the paper with the canvas separately, and then stick it on.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 88 Yes. Yes. If anything I decided I liked and I liked the effect of shadows and so on that it caused, I then would glue it onto the canvas, so in fact...

But that could also make it deeper, wouldn't it?

Mm, but I sort of found that, you know, it was a way of keeping it where I wanted it to be, deciding without losing the background, and also because I liked the effect of it, of making it permanent by doing that too. But that's quite different from relying on sacking and other areas to make relief work. It's not totally different but it sort of has a different sort of way of working, doing.

One associates that kind of sort of matière work with sort of someone like Tàpies or...

Matisse. Yes.

The thick sort of stuff, concrete or sand or sawdust or whatever, things like that.

Well I do enjoy his work immensely, Tàpies. To me it's sort of, it's his secret how he gets it or what he uses.

I mean those sort of walls that he did in the Fifties, I mean extraordinary.

Yes. Very extraordinary, mm.

But, I mean were you aware of them then?

I think I've known of him, and I've also I think compared him in my mind to Alberto, there's a totally different look in both of them. I very very much like Tàpies' works. And I also recently, it was very strange, I went to an exhibition of Chillida in the Hayward, but on the one wall there were two large collaged black or cream and white, black and white or black and cream, I think prints or...and I thought, that's my work, I was shocked when I saw it. Because I had been doing things like that.

I think they were relief prints I seem to remember.

Yes. I really really felt very very close to them.

Rather beautiful. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 89

Beautiful. And something that was what...the sort of what I was working in.

Talking about photographs earlier and the Ida Kar, there's a great photograph of you in Venice with Lilian Somerville.

Yes. Well that was one of the...we used to, Kenneth and...probably that was when I visited Venice with Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick.

When you were in the Biennale?

Yes. And they used to call her Aunt Lil.

What was she like?

Well she was a great...she was quite formidable but she was very much in control of that situation. She was...I mean I did feel in awe of her, she was quite forceful, and she always paid for her own drinks, her own drink.

What, you mean not for anyone else's?

I think, no, I rather feel she sort of ordered her drink and paid for it. I don't know, there was something about her. She wouldn't accept things from others. And we weren't close friends, but she was certainly, you know, very helpful to me, and I...

She was a supporter?

Yes, but she was sort of the iron lady a bit, yes.

She carried a lot of weight though didn't she?

Mm.

One knows that about her, and that she was quite sort of difficult.

But she did, she was a bit of a flirt, so you know, she got on far better with Kenneth. But no, she...I was quite the silent partner on those occasions.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 90 So, you were showing by now I think a bit abroad, quite a bit abroad?

Well that really was to do with Gimpel, because they were rather marvellous in that sense, they arranged many many exhibitions abroad, and the Saidenberg was through Gimpel. So I think all my abroad work was really... Oh and the British Council, no the British Council did send work abroad, quite a lot of things went to various countries through the British Council.

And that was her wasn't it, Lilian?

Yes that was her, yes.

And, how were you sort of making a living at this point, were you making enough from pictures, or were you...?

Well in 1960, yes, I was earning my own living then. In 1960 I was asked to teach at the Royal College, and so I had a salary.

Who asked you, who was running it then?

Well Carel Weight asked me, he... But when I got there I found that Ruskin Spear was there, Robert Buhler was on the staff at that time, Roger de Grey who I adored, Carel, Colin Hayes, Leonard Rosoman, and, oh, who's that man whose daughter is an architect or something? Evans, Merlyn Evans. And Robin Darwin, and he really liked the painters in the Painting School, so he used to have lunch with us. And there was a lovely time during the day there when we would sit in the sort of Painting School staff room, and it was really lovely company, it was like being at a marvellous party, because they were all so kind of, you know, articulate and interesting and funny.

How much teaching did you do?

Well I used to do one day a week, and I usually had a group of painters who were mostly really interested in abstract painting but not always; I mean it was a sort of exchange thing of which students would want me to teach them or which I would want to or whatever, but it had to be kind of mutually interesting. And Hockney and Kitaj were there at the time, and I used to say to Hockney, `I can't teach you anything, I just come in and enjoy what...every masterpiece I come and look at.' Because every Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 91 time you went there there was some wonderful painting that's now world famous, week by week.

Did you recognise him that...?

Oh yes, one knew he was enormously talented, and very contained, very much had, you know, had formed a sense... But he was very nice to talk to. And so was Kitaj, I really like Kitaj, very very much.

And do you feel that you picked up things from what they were doing, I mean a different kind of work?

Yes, I did very much so.

A different generation.

Well I did, I both... In one way I didn't like it because I felt that I would sort of start... I had been doing my own work, and then I would go there and then because, you know, the way I taught was to really try to understand... Because very often I would look at a picture and think, you know, form an opinion about it; then I would say to them, `What are you trying to do in this picture?' and to my amazement they'd be [INAUDIBLE]. You know, I had no idea that that was what they were trying to do. And so, and then I would discuss how they felt about it and how I felt about it and what one might, if there were problems in it, you know, but because I became very involved with the pictures that I had looked at and talked about, I found it broke up whatever flow of ideas I had had about what I was doing. And so in one sense I was uneasy about teaching, but it was such a marvellous day there because there would be those incredible students and their work, the staff who, you know, every one of them I found enjoyable, and lunch with Robin and all the sort of talk that would go on.

What was he like, Darwin?

Well, he was a sort of, quite a kind of bear in a way. He was very much in control or in charge, you know there. But he was also a very tender man and he loved talking and loved being talked to. And he liked, again, you know, great criteria for getting on with someone, he seemed fond of me and so that was very nice for me.

And did you have a favourite out of the others? I mean you... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 92

Well I had always loved Ruskin because he had been at St Martin's, so... And Roger was someone who, I would love to have shared my life with Roger, I just found Roger, I liked everything about Roger.

Did you meet him before then [INAUDIBLE]?

No, no I only met him at the College.

And there were various others as well, as you say.

Yes, and together they all sort of, you know... And Leonard Rosoman.

Were they all there at the same time?

Yes, yes. Leonard Rosoman, Roger de Grey, Colin Hayes, Ruskin Spear, Robert Buhler, Merlyn Evans, and Bateson Mason were there when I was there too. And so there was this lovely company every time you went there. And the College, I think the College was very enjoyable in itself, the different departments, what was going on there. The Fashion School was fabulous and the Textiles, the Printmaking was very good.

Did you find that sort of all fed your own work or was it a distraction?

No, because the other things, talking to students and their work was a distraction in the sense that, to get really into it, to talk to them about it, you had to experience the work, and that would break across sometimes my own train of thought or what I was trying to do. But you know, it would sort of...my mind would be fixed, would have to change again to go into... But the other things that were going on were just great pleasure and inspiring to see what was happening in the College.

And you enjoyed teaching?

I certainly enjoyed teaching at the College, because the College at that time was totally different to the College nowadays. I mean it was part of the V & A to start with, and the V & A was open, so you had these great wonderful worlds that, the entire V & A to wander through if you felt like it, or have lunch there; there was a senior common room; there were the departments and what was going in them; there Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Page 93 were no locks on the doors, you could... You know, nowadays it's like Fort Knox to get into the Royal College and to get out of it, you can neither get in or get out. And there you could just wander. And then we, to begin with we had 21 Cromwell Road as the common room, because we hadn't yet moved up to Kensington Gore, and that was very pleasurable.

Was this before the new building?

That's right. I was there 1960 or '61. And then when the new building happened the senior common room was very comfortable. So, it was lovely.

And you haven't taught anywhere else?

Yes, I've taught in all sort of other places, not permanently but I had all sorts of arrangements for, sometimes a year I would go... I once went up to Manchester regularly when Norman Adams was head of the department. I've been to Newcastle, and, what other schools? Reading, I went and taught at. And once I think Bristol and Brighton I went. But not on a regular basis, just the odd visit, or for a sort of six- month period or something.

End of Track 7: Tape 4: Side A Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 94 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B

In his introduction to your exhibition at the Sackler Galleries, the catalogue for that, Norbert says that, Norbert Lynton says that he thinks you found your voice in the Sixties, your truly individual voice as an artist. Would you subscribe to that?

No. I think it happened in the Fifties really where, or at least it began in the Fifties. I think the work I did in the Fifties, at the end of the Fifties were where the basic forms were begun. I think...do you know which particular work...he did allude to the big green and white picture, didn't he?

That's '69.

That's '69.

That's right at the end of the Sixties.

That's right at the end of the Sixties, yes. And so which works do you think he was referring to?

I don't know, I thought, I got the impression it was the sort of tea paintings, which are mid-Sixties aren't they?

Yes, they're '66, sort of, yes. Well I think the tea paintings were really an adjunct in a sense, or a follow-on certainly to the more encrusted works, it was sort of a freeing from the surface and seeing what would happen without that. And so I think that was very connected to the earlier work.

But I mean, do you think of any one painting that marked a watershed?

I can think of groups of... I think...I do think that the green painting was a definitive work, but I think before then, what I've noticed when I've looked back through the work I've done, is that there are elements of some of the early works that come and go, and there is a sort of using and then exchanging, and there are reoccurrences of certain ways of doing things throughout. And, so I think the use for collage does relate back to the Fifties. There was a certain landscape feeling in the Fifties work I think, particularly the end of the Fifties, and that group in 1960 which were the ones with charcoal were connected too with a landscape feeling I think. And I suppose Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 95 mid-Sixties... And I would agree in one sense, the use of big bands came in in those tea paintings which were then evident in the large green work which was at the end of the Sixties. But I think another very definitive group of work, which happened in... In fact the next jump for me is in the Seventies - no the Eighties, when, there were a group of collages with certain shapes in them which have then recurred again during the Eighties and now which were certain, well just shapes I think. There was a group of collages. And then later in the early Nineties there were four prints which echoed those I think. And then I think there was a very, there was a painting in the end of the Eighties, in '88 I think, which was called `Vivace' which I think is another definitive work, and that was really an attempt, I was getting very worried about the, or not worried but it was disturbing me that so much control, I had had so much control over every statement in the painting that I kind of tried it and re-tried it with a collage effect, and it was really an attempt of spontaneity in the work of just trying to make a gestural work that was not tried and re-tried and re-tried, that happened immediately.

Victor Pasmore talks about that as being action painting, doesn't he?

Well, did he? Yes, he talked...

Well in the catalogue for Francis Graham-Dixon.

He said...yes that's right. And masterpieces. I mean, I must say, I was very pleased he said that. But, then unfortunately he killed it. It was awful you know. I was really beginning to do a series of works like that, and the following year there was one called `Glad Ocean' which is another great gestural painting, and it was, I could see sort of future paintings and developing the idea, but, he made a remark which since then I've been very annoyed about, because he said to me, `You can't go on doing this, you did it last year'. And it killed it. I mean, he was to me a sort of guru really, I thought he was so wonderful and I was so pleased he liked my work, and he sort of froze me in that, and it was very sad because when I thought about it, I thought, what's he talking about? Because if you think of his own work...

Been repeating it for years!

Yes, every year is the same thing, the same use of the way he paints. I thought, how could he say that? But anyway, it did unfortunately, it stopped, really stopped me in my tracks with that. And it coincided, it was the end of the Eighties, with all the Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 96 horror and the disaster of those rents that, you know, the rents that went up at that time and made life almost impossible really.

But, would you think of yourself, or have you ever thought of yourself, as an action painter or as a minimalist, or do you see yourself fitting into any kind of bracket?

No. I think the one I would say, because it's consistent, is that I would accept and think of myself as an abstract painter, because they aren't figurative works, and although they have allusions to figuration they aren't deliberately figurative. And so therefore I think abstract could be applied to all the aspects of the work.

Where did that impulse to collage come from? Presumably from Burri.

Yes, really from Burri.

Not from the Surrealists or anybody?

No, no, but I do think that, another work that means a lot to me is Matisse's work in the Tate, and although it's very thin collage and the collage really isn't used for relief work, it did...I was very excited by that picture. Well that's one of the Matisses I really have reacted to. And I think, because Alberto didn't...he used collage as a surface and not really as notes of colour, and I have used the collage to decide where the notes go, so although they are not Matisse shape notes they are quite often, as in `Vivace', notes of colour.

With this painting, `Green and White', which is 1969, Norbert says that `An acquaintance slashed it vertically'. What happened?

Yes. I mean it has two connections. One is what I talked of earlier, which is the psychological thing, it did have a deliberate psychological situation in it where there was a tension between two parts, and the thin lines were again a sort of contrast to what was happening. But the slashing was, somebody I knew who was unfortunately, well almost psychopathic, and was very often very dangerous and very drunk, who entered my studio and slashed the... He had done other things in my studio, such as taken...I had some Sandtex once, a big gallon, or five-gallon jars of, I was using that texture paint, and he poured them all over himself, it was a nightmare. And then he left and was rampaging up and down the Fulham Road, and the police refused to arrest him because they said he would make the station a mess. [LAUGHING] Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 97

That's not the right attitude.

Not the right attitude. But...

Was he dangerous, to you?

Well, he never bodily, inflicted bodily...but I always felt, because he was, he was sort of rather obsessed with me, and he was dangerous, and it was really frightening. But anyway, he didn't fortunately slash me, he slashed the work.

But did he do it rather neatly? It looks as if he might have [INAUDIBLE].

Well he just picked up a knife. If you look at the picture, it was standing on the floor, it's at sort of arm's length it starts at, and then he went through it and down it, so it was slashed from the height it started, which wasn't the absolute top, to the bottom of the picture. And then...and I didn't really realise the effect it would have; I just decided I wasn't going to lose the painting, so I then, first I think I sewed the edges together, and then I stuck a strip at the back and stuck a strip in the front, and then painted over it, so it became part of the picture. But it was miraculous because it was a bit like Salisbury Cathedral where you've got the rather heavy big spire and then that marvellous thin delicate spire which is exactly right in balance with it. And miraculously he had slashed it in a place where it did affect the other two bands, and it was a perfect conclusion to the whole painting.

I hope you didn't get any more trouble from this chap, or did it carry on?

No, fortunately, no, that...

Whose name we won't mention.

Whose name...

I mean, have you had that kind of intervention of chance before in works?

Not as dramatically and as successfully as in that picture.

Would you allow chance to enter into your work...? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 98

I think chance enters into all work, because I think very often I intend to do something with a painting and when I do it it doesn't work in exactly the way I've intended. If I'm lucky the chance, or the unintended thing, will work. And I think Francis Bacon once said something about that to me, he said, `You just don't know why they're going to work when they work, and some pictures just won't work whatever you do to them.' So, I think he took tremendous chances with those marks he made in works.

He used to destroy quite a lot I believe.

I would think so, mm.

I mean do you do that?

Well there are a lot of pictures that I discard, yes, that I...I mean I've wasted... I have a habit, and it's very expensive, of, I wish I could get out of it. At one time I just relied on my eye and looking at pictures through a mirror, and of looking at pictures upside down or on various sides, and in that way sort of assessing what was happening all around the picture. But at some time, and I can't remember, I think it must have been a long time ago, I began, certainly in the Sixties, because, I began taking Polaroids of paintings, because I found that one could then hold them in one's hand, easily turn them up, especially large paintings, and then get that sense of the balance in them. And I began to rely on it to a great deal, and to the end when, if I did some tiny stroke I would take a Polaroid to see how that movement... And I've got boxes of Polaroids of a picture which, of one painting where there are really sort of two or three, of every stroke is kind of followed. The cost of it is phenomenal, you know. But it became really an integral part of working, it was... It was a quick way of sort of seeing, you know, the effects. And...

Black and white or colour?

To begin with they were black and white and then, for quite a while now, the Sixties ones were black and white I think and then I think in the Seventies they became colour.

Do they fade?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 99 Mm, the early ones are fading, some have faded. The colour ones haven't faded quite so much. I don't suppose they'll last very long but I have them, I still do it.

Do you keep them as a...I mean are they useful as source material?

Well what I find now... Extraordinary source material, because you suddenly, when you haven't looked at the picture for sort of some years or something, you get the box out, you suddenly see that at certain moments they were very good, and I've lost them, and then, you can never paint the same picture again, but a lot of them have ideas that I do actually work from, and I take things from them, they are references, sources for, you know, new paintings very often.

Going on from that, I mean do you find it difficult to know when a painting is finished?

No. Well I mean it may not be finished to other people but very often to me it's reached a sort of balance I want, and then I consider it finished.

But then if you think that some of the stages it's gone through were rather wonderful, I mean, they would be different paintings of course, but...

Well I mean, one picture that deeply upsets me, really, I mean is agony almost to think of, is that when I arrived in Cornwall I was asked by the Tate St Ives to put a work in their Porthmeor Beach exhibition in 1995, and I had only just begun to work in the Porthmeor studio, and so I thought, well I haven't got an available work but I will try and do one as I'm here and the impressions are fresh. And it, that again was, I took Polaroids throughout that one. And there was one moment that I now see it that I really liked it, and unfortunately I lost it, I sort of went on working over it. And what I eventually put in that exhibition was so boring and such...I didn't really want to put it in in the end, but Mike Tooby said it had an interest, and it did have a certain interest, but it was nothing like what it had been at an earlier stage.

You don't think that happens very often?

No, but I can see that there are certain indications in some of the Polaroids where, although I didn't carry that through at that stage, they could have become good pictures or interesting pictures, so, they're not always sort of, there are not many where I say, oh that was finished, but there are many where I could see an idea could Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 100 be... And some that I do think are finished which have just been...because the, unfortunately the collage works very often unfortunately fall to pieces before one's done, you know, and then they're lost.

What do you mean?

Well the staples come out, they're only stapled on. Unless you glue them down. I only glue them down when I think they're finished, and then, you know, bits fall of them, and they...

You forget where they are?

Well you just lose the...yes, they get lost on the floor, and...

Because you've got lots of other things on the floor?

Yes exactly.

Yes. But that `Green and White' which the Tate bought, didn't they?

Mm, yes.

That's a crucial painting?

That's a really crucial painting, yes.

When...is that in acrylic?

Yes. I think what was crucial about it, it was 1969 and I think it was my first large painting, I had never painted a picture that size before, and it was also, although, God knows, it's really a monochrome, because it's just green and white and so it's almost one colour on white, but nevertheless it was...the tea pictures, which had preceded it, and which it's a part of, because they have those bands in them, they were just ash and tea on canvas, and this was the first one where there were shades of colour; although it's green there are shades of green in it, and so it was the first combination of the very big broad shapes and colour.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 101 Where does this kind of V or sort of elbow shape come from? It looks like a way in to all sorts of things, it could be, I mean if one wants to read in references. But it seems like a motif that recurs.

It recurred, and it has recurred. I don't really know where it came...it just came, I mean there it was.

It's a dynamic shape isn't it.

Yes. And it's a gestural shape of doing that. And I had for some time been using right-angles in the work, and I think that it did come from, probably...I don't have a clear, a recollection, when I decided to use that shape . It began to appear. Looking back at a guess it might have related to the right-angles in another, at an angle as it were. But, I don't know, I don't know why it came into the work, but it did come into the work. And, I could only just make a guess like anyone else why it might have...

So, I mean when things happen you don't, you wouldn't sort of try and analyse them?

Well some...there are intentions of certain effects. I mean, I have an intention now, I've never really realised it, I've had it for some time, I want to keep the simplicity of the work so there's an immediate reading of it. But I also long to use colour, and I really, I enjoy Gillian Ayres' work very much, and I can see with her method where you have masses of groups of colours all over, you can get tremendous colour interactions because you have so many colours and they interact. Well, if you're trying to keep a very simple shape, there's not much space to put the colour, unless you have a sort of mottled background as it were that's full of colours moving around all over it, but it's really one surface. And I'm very interested in making what I call, really what I learnt, or experienced with Alberto, where there's sort of notes that connect. [BREAK IN RECORDING] The appearance of notes of colour in a work, where there's a definite relationship across the space of the painting of that colour note to another area of colour. Which happened in Roger's work too. And that interests me, and so, I keep trying, and I don't think I've arrived at it in a way that really satisfies me of introducing the simplicity of the shapes, the colour notes.

I mean, is this, when you talk about colour notes, are they appearing on the surface or are they in depth?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 102 No, they would be in depth, and they would be, they would relate both across the surface and in depth, so they would affect what's called the picture plane that... But they also have to be part of, or connected to the shapes that are already there, or are going to be there as well. So it's really like a piece of sculpture with a form attached to it or close to it that interacts with, well all the shapes should interact.

Do you, I mean, generally work on...imagine a deep space that you're working with?

No. No, in fact there was a time when I did imagine, and with great mental effort which made my brain ache really, concentrate on that movement in space, and those were the Sixties, the group that was in Gimpels in 1960. I think you can see it happening in those works, and those works were where I was really concentrating on it. I mean I don't, I think I rather gave it up when I saw the big American field paintings which interested me, and also...

When was that?

Well that was when, around the time when I did the big green one, whenever these large works began to be... When I went over to New York in '58, yes, I saw them.

By whom?

Well one of the people I really loved was Morris Louis; that's not quite a field painting but it had... I wonder, even as we talk suddenly it comes to mind, that I did really like Morris Louis' work, and of course there is that, across the canvas a sort of V-shape, whether that somehow, subconsciously kind of came into my mind. And then obviously Rothko has these great sort of field areas, field things. But, anyway, that 1969 picture was the first large painting, and it also was the first painting where there was a combination - no it wasn't - yes it was, of shapes, and some use of colour, of bringing in a colour area into it.

What is it about Morris Louis that excites you?

I found them thrilling. I found the fact they were so simple, that what was there connected with the space of the total and with...usually it was sort of one...flow of colours on one side and various lines of colour on the other, but how the proportions absolutely worked. And I liked the colour itself. And it did give me a sense of sort of great spaces and movement in space. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 103

You didn't get seduced by the stripes?

The stripes were part of it, but it was really I think the thrill of the held space, the space being right, and the simplicity.

And didn't you like that very sort of, the idea of staining rather than painting?

Loved it, yes I loved it.

Because you yourself were going away from thicker painting towards much thinner painting, so that was in line perhaps with that.

Mm. And I suppose, you know, one combined that with seeing the Rothkos and the actual great areas of colour in the Rothkos with the spatial movements around the edges of them.

Were people, other people that you knew, were they looking towards American work as well?

Nobody that I was closely connected to, no, because really, the funny thing, the only people I really have been closely connected to in painting are Roger and Alberto Burri. I mean I like other people's work, so it would have really been somebody's work I liked rather than knowing them. But, no, there was no one in particular.

It's not the sort of thing you might discuss with Pat Heron or...?

Well after I came back from Cornwall I've hardly seen Patrick really. No, I never discuss... I suppose I might have read things he would have written, but then I didn't, I don't remember any significant thing.

Do you, I mean do you pay much attention to art magazines and that kind of thing, I mean do you read...?

Well I did at one time, but I haven't for some years now. I will occasionally read an article if it's...or a catalogue, if it's about something that particularly interests me, but I suddenly don't want to hear it.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 104 Is it too much of a distraction?

I don't want to know what they think about it, I just want the work itself to be the main interest, and how it, what happens to it. And I think it's...it's a sort of, in a way another form of creation, you know, the people who write those things form something from having seen works. But to me, there was a time when it was of interest, but I now, I seem to have read it all before in some, many ways, and I just want the work to be the dominating thing.

Do you like the activity of reading anyway, I mean do you read for your own entertainment?

Well, I do like reading novels, and I do like reading poetry. But recently, I mean my life's been very disorganised for quite a few years, and I haven't really had the leisure or the time where one can quietly sit and read.

But if you say that you like novels and poetry, are there any particular people that come to mind?

Well I mean recently, the last thing I've been reading is, I got fascinated by it, I don't think it's supposed to be very, well it doesn't go far enough, but it just happened to be around where I was. No, one thing I adored, which I read lately, which is a bit late in the day to be reading, but I read a `Herzog, The Rain King' by Saul Bellow, and I'd never read Saul Bellow before but I just found it an absolutely astonishing book. And I wanted to get hold of his other book. No...

`Herzog', one, `Henderson The Rain King'.

`Henderson The Rain King'. I read `Henderson', but I tried to get hold of `Herzog', and I did in fact buy it in Hatchards, and I couldn't believe it, when I got home it wasn't there. It's one of those mysteries of life, I've never understood why it wasn't there when I got home, so, I haven't yet read it. But the book I recently read was by, it was Gaskell's `Life of Brontë', Elizabeth...is it Gaskell?

Yes.

Yes. And, it really, what's in it which was of the greatest interest to me is Charlotte Brontë's letters, her own words and her own letters, and that strange life she lived, and Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 105 the loneliness of it. I think perhaps because it's in a place that might slightly resemble Cornwall, and that she was isolated, and I have been aware of being out of my own environment rather, or the environment I had been used to all my life, which is London. And so, there are lots of very interesting things she said to me, that were interesting to me.

Do you have any favourite writers, I mean over the years have come back again and again to enrich you or entertain you or that have sort of plus points?

There was a time that Auden, W.H. Auden meant a great deal to me, and I can connect that with Roger de Grey, because there is a certain, you know, exactness of words in Auden that, in a rather different way but I think, in Roger's conversation resembled.

I mean you mention Roger quite often, I mean, you use him as a kind of touchstone in a sense.

Well there are some people alive who I've liked more than others, you know, people who are special to me, and Roger is one of them.

Yes. I mean, do you admire him as a painter as well, or as a person?

Well, I liked that show very much last night. When he was alive, it may be his own modesty but the focus was not on his paintings, but seeing the show last night I've seen many things that I really enjoyed in his work.

He said to me in the interview that painting was enormously important to him, though it probably didn't seem so to other people.

That is absolutely true, yes. But it was his behaviour and the way he talked and the way, of course, what he did to the Academy when he was there and what it was like when he was there, as well as being at the College with him.

Did you see a great deal of him, or was it just now and then?

Well, when he was at the Academy I did, because I was living in London all the time he was President, and I frequently was asked, because I lived so near and I could get there in twenty minutes from where I was in South Kensington, I was asked to lots of, Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Page 106 you know, dinners and occasions, and Roger, I think he had sort of people who were more close to the Academy than others, and I was one of them, I was lucky enough to be one of them.

Do you like that kind of thing, I mean do you enjoy the social life of the Academy, I mean coming to dinners and that sort of thing?

Well I don't like them for their own sake, but I do really like to be amongst people I enjoy and whose company and whose conversation I enjoy, yes I do like that. And I suppose I did get, that happened at the Academy more than other places because I was there more often than other places. And I know that Roger, well for example, he thought it was going to be his last year as President; when I was on the council and was on the hanging committee, and he said, you know, he thought it would be the last exhibition he would hang as the President, and he said, `I want to hang it with you,' so that was something I was so pleased, you know.

But, I mean as a person generally, I mean do you enjoy a sort of active social life and going out and doing things?

Yes, I think so. When I've got time for it, you know, when I've... I don't think I could do it every night, but when I do I enjoy it very much, yes. I just like sort of being amongst people who interest, who attract me in some way, and hear what they have to say. And, I suppose, you know... I also very much like going to exhibitions and looking at paintings.

On your own?

Oh yes, I don't like going...

Quietly.

Yes. I don't like going with other people. I don't want to have to stop and say what I think about it at a certain moment, or... No, I just want to go in and get an impact, or see a work and get affected by it, and sort of, and I don't want that to be interfered with when it's happening.

End of Track 8: Tape 4: Side B Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 107 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A

You mentioned Auden as a poet, you didn't mention any novelists, and I wondered if, I mean I don't want to make too much of it, I just wondered, because I know that I have certain favourites who mean quite a lot to me as writers, but maybe you're a browser and sort of, cover a wider area.

Well I mean, when I was in my teens reading, you know, I avidly read many many novels including Russian novels and French novels, and obviously English novels. I then, I haven't had, I haven't stayed... I know...oh yes I do know, here's one, because, I have had various vicissitudes in emotional involvements, and I have read with great - also I think she is a rather wonderful writer - is Anita Brookner. I know everyone gets terribly depressed when they read her work, and she is depressing, but there is that... Also she is Jewish, and...so she is someone I have... And I had a time, oh yes, when I did read practically everything that Iris Murdoch wrote.

I tend to find Anita Brookner quite old-fashioned in the way she writes.

Well I have heard someone describe her as looking like a furled umbrella. I think there's something of that in her writing. But it has an amazing flow I feel, that mellifluous flow in her writing.

And you obviously think it encapsulates some kinds of truth?

Well there's always some sort of, it's usually a good time to read her when your heart's broken. [LAUGHS] There's some sort of dreadful misery in affairs that never seem to quite work, or always... There's never sort of...

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

Iris Murdoch.

Yes, well I read practically every novel that she wrote at one time. And, also, and I very much enjoyed what she was writing, but there was also, something I rather enjoyed in her novels, which is nothing to do with writing, there's always a moment in every novel where one is almost hysterical with laughter, because there's such a ludicrous situation suddenly, you know. But to go from novels to people, thinking of the people I've known who I've particularly liked, one is Prunella Clough, because she Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 108 is a marvellous talker and she is also a marvellous painter I think, and I think, I do really enjoy being friends with people whose paintings I like, because there's a sense of connecting in work with them and through them. But one of my, my closest friend is Jill Neville, who is a novelist, an Australian novelist.

Jill...?

Jill Neville. And, we've known each other for most of our lives I think, and I can... We are in each other's confidence and you know, we talk very freely to each other. She's married to Lewis Wolpert who is a scientist.

Do you, I mean does it...does she...do you take an interest in her writing and does she take an interest in your art?

Yes, I do take an interest in her writing, and she takes an interest in my painting, and she also thinks that I would have been a very good novelist if I had written.

It goes back to your first...

[LAUGHS] Yes.

The early years. Have you known Prunella for a long time?

I've known Prunella a very long time, and, I don't see a lot of her but it's always on a very friendly basis when I do see her. And, I do miss her in fact in Cornwall, she is one of the people I miss.

Yes, she's a very extraordinary woman.

Mm.

When did you start using acrylic paint?

Well I was using oils in the Fifties so it must have been in the Sixties.

I think it sort of came in about 1963 didn't it, or am I...?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 109 I'm not sure if it came in as early as that. I always wonder whether, it was with the tea paintings that I... I think...I think the early Sixties. I was still... I don't know, I don't know when it came in, I can't remember now.

But, I mean what was it that appealed, was it just that it was a new medium that you wanted to try, or was it something else?

Well, because I wasn't using encrusted surfaces any longer, what I very much liked about it was the fact that it's quick-drying and that you could get on with the picture, so it sort of, it could happen much more quickly with... There weren't interruptions of waiting for a drying time with it.

Would that necessarily increase your output then?

I don't know if it increased my output, but what it did mean was that in the heat of the moment of painting the picture one could not...you don't have to stop and wait.

But that could also have a bad effect inasmuch as you never had time to think about what you were doing or consider it.

Well, I think that when things...they didn't always...they didn't happen all the time; there would be a moment when I would look at a picture, you know, walk round it, think about it, and then there's a sudden moment when a decision is made, or I would sit. I do remember a process which I haven't remembered as happening as clearly recently as it did at one time, where, especially for example with `Vivace' where I made the initial gesture, but then the picture wasn't finished and I just had to sit a very long time and think about it and look at it, and it took quite a long time before I began, and it sort of began to tell me what it wanted. But one had to look and look and think about it, and then suddenly something would come from it, so, what should be done to it? So, but when that did happen, when that message as it were, or that decision was arrived at, then the thing was, to get it done, you know, and not lose it. So the acrylic had great advantages in that because you could...once the decision was made you could go, carry through with what you were doing, there was no waiting for another stage before, rather like etching or something, you have to wait for the stages. So, I mean, I don't know, perhaps, obviously Gillian's are very spontaneous, her work, so, regardless of whether they're oil or not, she uses them I should think. But the way I work I think I would have had to wait for a surface to dry and then work on it or something. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 110

Like glazes?

Mm.

How do you make a huge great gesture like `Vivace'? I mean do you get an enormous great brush?

Well, I mean I haven't, I've only done two big pictures until - unfortunately for Victor. I put the work on the floor, because I thought if I had it up it would just run down it, and then I think, I took my shoes off or something, I'm not quite sure, or did I put wellington boots on, one or the other, either bare-foot or... I then mixed up a pale of the colour and then I walked over it, and I threw it where I wanted it, I directed it as far as I could, and followed it round the picture. I had to be very careful not to walk in the splashes and get foot marks on it. And I think, I think the second gesture was probably done from outside the picture but the first one just walked across it. And then with, I think, a broom or a mop I pushed it where I thought it needed to sort of balance out. And then, there was one quick stage where I very quickly put it up, and you can see in the picture where it's run a bit, and made a quick decision, what did it want, what did it want more, and quickly put it down again, and then added what I thought, I glimpsed it, you know, when I had seen it up.

Because you can't really see it on the floor.

No, although I had a balcony, I had a balcony, and I did look at it from the balcony, but nevertheless I felt the balcony was really distorting it, so... And I think probably I ran off following the line, although I don't remember that but I think I did do it, I lifted it to run off some of this surplus colour onto the floor. But the other one, `Glad Ocean', is quite near the edge so I think I was able to do that one more from the edge.

In 1966 you started to show at the New Art Centre, how did that come about?

Oh, that was unfortunate. Well, I had been with Gimpels, and they were very very good to me, but it was, I think in '66 or '65, anyway, probably '66, they had told me that there was going to be an exhibition in I think September of that year, and so, I then, Donald Hamilton Fraser was teaching at the Royal College, and so I mentioned that to Donald and he said, `No you're not Sandra, because I'm showing on one of those months and then there's an Albers exhibition coming over,' and then there was Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 111 another one in October. And he said, because he had been told he had to wait to see what time the Albers arrived to know which of the months he was going to be, and he said, `You're not in any of those three months'. So I didn't really mind about that very much because I knew if it wasn't then it would be some other time; I wasn't greatly concerned about it. But my mother was taking a huge interest in my career at that time, and she got rather upset that they had said this, and I said, `Please don't worry, they haven't asked me to leave the gallery or anything, they're just...you know, it's all a bit vague there, and the dates, oh, it'll be another date.' And so she said, `I think you ought to...if they've told you it's going to be one month...' And I think I said that they had said it was going to be in January or something like that. And she said, `Well, they told you it's going to be in September,' or whenever, `and it wasn't; they might say the same in January.' And I said, `What does it matter really?' And anyway, because she was sort of upset about it, and I didn't want her to be, I wrote quite a nice letter to Peter saying that, you know, there had been a sort of, a bit of a mix up about the first date, so they could they confirm that it was going to be in January? Well unfortunately Peter, I didn't know that, I wrote to Peter because I really, well he and I always discussed my exhibitions rather than Charles and I, Peter was in hospital, and I didn't know that when I sent the letter, and so Charles read it. Charles was very temperamental. Did you know him? No you wouldn't, it was before you were born obviously... And, he said, he wrote me back, he said, `If my brother's word isn't good enough for you, perhaps you ought to find another gallery.' So I wrote back, a telegram I sent back, I said, `Will you tell me how many you have of my works from the Academy, and I'll have them all removed.' [LAUGHING] And Peter was livid, he said, you know, `You're being disloyal the gallery.' But what unfortunately happened was, Madeleine was in Sloane Street, and as it's near and I liked going to see what was happening in various galleries, and I was in there one afternoon, and they were interested in my work, and so I sort of talked to them about this, I said there's ghastly sort of things happening at this moment. And she said, `Well look, why don't you show with us,' she said, `and be a big fish in a small pool?' Or, no, that's right, or something like that. And I was so cross with Charles for saying that that I said, `Yes all right, I will.' And she then showed me a magazine after I had said yes I would show, and it had, `Gimpel Fils, Sandra Blow, January.' Nightmare.

Infuriating.

Infuriating.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 112 But, I've got dates that you showed at Gimpels till 1960 but not until 1966 at the New Art Centre.

Well, no, I...I had a one-person show with the New Art Centre in '66. I'm not exactly sure when all this took place but I would think, I wouldn't have been...I would have then straight away had a one-person show, so it may well have been '65. And, no, I'm sure I showed with...I think I've got a catalogue that's later than that, was '62 with Gimpel.

They're very often inaccurate these things, it's just that they...so it was more of a modulation.

But something else happened later which connects the galleries in that I began to dislike the kind of two-year... With Madeleine one more or less showed every two years, and at one time one would love to have done that, but I began to feel I was on a kind of treadmill, and I wanted to experiment with ideas, and I sort of felt... And although there were reasons for it, but Madeleine began to give me directives because she said that very often the collages fell to pieces and one could quite understand that people...and as she was a dealer she wouldn't want to sell or have sold work that was insecure to people.

Because they were stapled?

Yes, or whatever, or the glue wasn't strong enough. And although I could understand, I suddenly felt I didn't want to be told how to do the work. And I was showing then from sort of, I don't quite know when I became a member of the Academy, but I began to sort of show work...

'71.

Yes, well, I was...it must have been around that time I pretty well came to that decision, that I was showing works, I could show up to six pictures a year in the Academy, which is like having a miniature exhibition anyway every year, and of a size you couldn't possibly show elsewhere. I showed the green picture in the Academy. And, I then felt I would enjoy for a while and have the freedom of not being committed to a gallery, because if you make the commitment then it's a two- way thing and you have to supply the work, because otherwise other people are losing their place. So, I opted out of, I didn't take up with another gallery for quite a while. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 113

And you still had the shop front of the Academy?

Of the Academy, exactly. And then I showed in the Hayward annual in '78.

Were they selling exhibitions at the Hayward?

They could have been if people wished to buy I think. I don't think they were published or usually thought of as selling exhibitions. And I showed in the Diploma Galleries in '79, so again I had a lot of works up in London which, you know, didn't require a gallery.

Was that a kind of retrospective?

Where?

In the Diploma.

No, it was a very curious thing. It was...no, it wasn't a retrospective. It was a very odd exhibition, because...

You shared it with someone didn't you?

Yes, Peter Coker had half of it and I had the other half. And it was very, a transitory exhibition, because, talking about perishable pictures, they were totally perishable pictures. When the works came back from the Hayward, the smaller works, they were very beautifully wrapped in, oh, what would it have been? You know, plastic.

PVC?

Which was very very fresh. And there were glimpses of the work through it. And it was so thrilling in a way that I began, it was irresistible. I had some bamboo in the studio for some reason and I began to add bamboo and other PVC on top of it, so one made a kind of semi-sculptural thing. And they really fascinated me doing that, I mean I wish I had given it more thought and could have done something permanent in that way. So the whole of the Diploma Gallery was that sort of work, which was all under work with plastic on top.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 114 And none of it survived?

Well, I mean the plastic, as you know, its life, you know, its freshness, and what eventually happened with them I just took the plastic off the top and went back to what was underneath them.

So it was really more of an installation which lasted for the show.

Exactly. Well it would have lasted... I've even still got I think one of them that I quite liked, or, I kept it for some years if I haven't still got it.

So this was a kind of construction rather than a painting.

Mm, yes.

And did...you didn't push it further in any other way?

Well, no I didn't, but I liked the idea of it but it would have needed a lot of technical know-how to do it, and I probably would have to have got permanent materials and various things. You could never have kept it like that I don't think, unless you just wanted it to be an instant effect.

That was a bit mischievous of you I suspect.

Well it was irresistible, it was something I simply couldn't resist. It did look wonderful I thought, and of course it reflected the light and so on. And also, I don't think at that time, you know, it wasn't like a commercial gallery that, the Diploma Galleries and the RA don't depend I don't think on the work selling, although I'm sure they would have been glad if they had. But, there wasn't the pressure to make them saleable.

What did you feel like on becoming a member, or an Associate as it would have been, an ARA, in 1971? I mean, surely it was going through its quite unfashionable phase at that point?

Well, it was very odd to me in a way because I'd been a student there, and although I hadn't been a student there for very long it did have a satisfaction of coming, of having been a student, to be an RA, because there was a connection to it. Again the Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 115 people who I was so immensely, you know, liked so much, the College staff, the majority of them were RAs, so it was an enclave inside the major kind of membership, major part of the membership, of being with people who had an intention and a plan really for the future of the RA. So...

But were there many other abstract painters at that time who were RAs?

No, in fact I was brought...

Were you the only one?

Yes, I was brought in as the...in fact the words were said, `The Wind of Change'. [LAUGHS]

Blowing in the wind.

Blowing in, blowing in. [LAUGHING]

And that was OK, it didn't worry you?

No, I...I really moved in...it was like being in convoy, you know, I was surrounded by this group that, and although they were kind of unknown waters a bit, you know, and not where I would normally be, the fact that I had this surround of friends who I liked immensely and who...wanting to, you know, do something for the future of the RA, it was OK in that set-up. And, I know that I...it ruined my career in some ways, because you know, I'm slanged as the RA abstract really now, but it has certainly caught up since and, you know...

Were you ever tempted or encouraged to take office in any way at the RA?

Well, I mean, I was suggested I stood for President but that would have been not...I wouldn't have had the energy to, or the capacity to do it really.

Would you have liked to do something like that?

No. I think it must have been to do with my father's silent rages, and a policy of sort of silence really, that I have found it difficult to talk publicly really. I can easily talk Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 116 one-to-one to anyone, but I do find, I try to get better at it, but it's something that doesn't come easily to me.

And what was the sort of relationship at this time with your parents? I mean you said that your mother was taking a lively interest in your career at Gimpels.

Yes. Well...

Was your father alive at this point?

My father died in 1976, and my mother died in 1981. And, I always loved my mother and father very much and, my mother did follow my career closely. My father I think always regretted that I hadn't married, but he, nothing was really said about it. But I didn't see a lot of them, and I did find it more and more difficult to go and see them actually.

Because you were so different to them, or...what else was so different?

Yes. Well, because I felt that they didn't know or would have understood the people that I was seeing, and I was quite worried about them actually. I did find the sort of choked sort of situation in my home where, it was never really easy to get a response to anything that one said, that I found it increasingly difficult to see them.

Because they didn't understand what you were doing?

I think that, yes, and, not just painting, it's the sort of conversations I would have with other people which were not possible with them, and... I think I wanted to please them, and yet I felt I couldn't get it right somehow with them. I could with my mother. She often visited me. I don't think my father ever came to my studio in Sydney Close.

So he wasn't really aware of what you were doing as an artist?

I don't think he ever had any interest in the work at all. But my mother did, and I don't know that she actually liked the pictures but she was interested in the fact that I was doing them and I was showing work publicly, and she came to all my exhibition openings and she visited my studio, which my father never did, he never went to, you know, private viewings and he never came to the studio. Then what happened, which Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 117 again affected my work, because it was in a way a tragedy, but with the green picture I reached a very good moment, and unfortunately, that was in 1969, and then the Christmas of that year I had, as I've told you, had rheumatic fever, and I hadn't been told this but because the valve had a scar tissue, was damaged by rheumatic fever, whenever I had an infection I should have had a course of antibiotics to protect the valve, and it was a very bad flu going around that winter - well not bad, it was just usual, but it was quite... Anyway, I got flu and pneumonia at the same time, and I couldn't... Oh yes, I was getting concerned, because I knew I was rather ill, and I rang the doctor but she was...it was a weekend and she wasn't there, and there was no way to get one, so I told the operator of my dilemma and she said I could ring the police doctor. And then I thought, oh that's pushing it a bit. And then suddenly I thought, oh my God! I'm dying, I actually feel I'm dying. And so I did get an emergency call and the ambulance came round and they said, `Can you walk to the ambulance?' and so I said yes. Of course, you know, there's a long passageway. And I fell down, I felt I couldn't walk. And my heart valve had become infected, and it practically shut, the valve sort of nearly shut. And the moment I got to St Stephens they said, `You must have a heart operation, but you can't have it now because you have to get rid of the, you know, this before you can have it.' And then, that was the only time my father did come to see me. I mean, I'm saying this now because I was talking of my father not visiting the studio, but he did visit me in St Stephens. And, I was in a sort of terminal ward because everyone was dying around me, it was a nightmare, and they said, the worry was that I wasn't responding to the antibiotics, and they really didn't think that I would live through it. But when I did, they said this, and I said, `Well how did I live through it?' And they said, `Well, you're young and healthy.' I wasn't particularly young, I was 45, but I was healthy, so I was lucky. But I did immediately become a cardiac cripple, I could hardly walk, because the valve was not open, and I was in very great danger, and I had to hold railings if I tried to walk in the street. And then in March of 1970 I had my first heart operation and they reopened the valve, and then, they said that would last about ten years, and I said, `Can I do anything to make it last longer?' and they said no. And you know, he was wonderful, Mr Tubbs, he said, `No, nothing you can do will make it last.' So, I then, in 1980 I had to have a mitral valve replacement, which I was told... And it's really very regrettable, because it means that I have to be on Warfarin for the rest of my life, and...

Warfarin?

Mm.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 118 Rat poison?

Rat poison, yes. [LAUGHS] But it does, it's an anticoagulant. It kills the rats because they bleed to death. They've probably got used to it by now. And then my pulse became irregular, so I had to...that's the drug I took at midday. But the real shock of that one was, in 1970 I really did feel, you know, that I would live forever almost, you know, I had that sense of... And it was a moment of great power in my work and it was heartbreaking to me, literally, to be broken, to stop then.

How long did it stop you for?

Well, it took me a long time to... I was very shaken because I realised that I was, you know, vulnerable, and from then on I was going to be in danger. And it was a totally different position in life to be in. And it took the breath out of my sails literally, I mean, I painted a huge good picture and if that hadn't happened God knows, I mean I might have had a very wonderful year's work. Because I was really, it was really happening then, it was very sad to be sort of... Anyway I suppose I was lucky to have survived it. And then I had to start again, and it was, you know, but it wasn't...it had to build up again. And then in 1980, which wasn't so devastating because I was aware of it all by then, but it was...I was a different person after the operation than I had been before it, and the power that I could put into my work was different, for some time anyway.

And did it stop you actually painting for a long time then?

No. What happened was, when I...it was very strange. I went to convalesce, the Brompton had a home near, in Hampshire near Farnham, and a woman in Farnham had been showing my work, Elizabeth Naydler, and she invited me to stay with them in the country and look after me for a bit, you know, so I didn't have to shop, for a couple of months afterwards, which was very very nice of her and it was very nice living with her. It was a family. But they let me work in a kind of shed outside. And then I did dozens of things on paper with, there was some straw around and using glue, it was cow gum I think, and straw, and I did lots of very gestural things, and some of them are very close to that big later gestural paintings. But that was part, you know, of the way the work went really. So it might seem, you know, a bit strange that that green picture didn't have a sequel, and there could have been, I mean I think there could have been a marvellous, for me, group of paintings come out.....

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Page 119 End of Track 9: Tape 5: Side A Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 120 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B

So since your operation in 1980...

Well I had one in 1970 and one in 1980. I haven't had one since. There was a great scare at one time in the Eighties that the valves, the Bjork-Shiley valve that I had, which was made in California, were faulty. And that was a night...I think the Brompton had hundreds and hundreds of phone calls every day from people who had had them, but luckily I don't seem to have had a faulty one and it has worked. It's medical engineering and it does work exceedingly well. But you never now, and I don't know if any day it might go, I don't know, but so far, touch wood, it hasn't. And a very nice doctor in Cornwall, Dr Gibbons, who was associated with the Brompton and, I'm supposed to have check-ups, so I see him as it saves a visit, you know, and he's been very reassuring about it and said that it's working very well and they're very strong and it could well, I could well live till 90 or 100 with it. So, you know, it's the luck of the draw really.

Has it had any effect on your life, I mean it hasn't stopped you from doing anything you might want to?

Well, I mean I suppose, there has been I'm afraid a further complication that to my horror in 1990, or '91, it was discovered that I was what's called a late-onset diabetic, and I mean that is a lethal combination, to have diabetes and not a properly functioning heart, because diabetes does affect the arteries. So I do feel that every day I'm playing Russian roulette really with, you know, whether I'm going to get through or not, but...

Do you have to take medication for diabetes?

Well, I'm a diet-controlled diabetic and so I don't take medication, but it does really stop...you have to give up food practically when you are a diabetic because anything you like you can guarantee you're not supposed to eat it, so it's a sort of awful bore in that way. But it is a pretty lousy combination to have, you know, lethal to have both of those things.

Is there any history of it, of illness in your family?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 121 Well yes, I think both my grandfather had rheumatic fever and he had, I think, mitral stenosis, and I think that my father was a diabetic although, yes, I think he did have diabetes. So that it is in the family I think.

And, I was asking you about how you got on with your parents when you sort of became famous and so on. How did you get on with your brothers?

Well, I think they both rather enjoyed really that I've had a certain sort of success, you know, so that hasn't formed any... I don't think...

Do you spend much time with them, I mean do you see them, or have you done since you grew up?

Well, we are in touch, and of course when our parents died, my father died in 1976 and my mother in 1981, and we had to...there were certain family friends we had to see to together so we did see quite a lot of each other then, and we still do. My brother came down to Cornwall, both of my brothers have visited me in Cornwall, yes.

And you get on, I mean you have a sort of...?

Yes we get on. We lead different lives, but again there are those differences of the people we connect to, but we do get on, yes. There's a pleasant feeling.

They're not artistic?

No. My father, both of them were connected with, to begin with the fruit trade, and were growers or wholesalers, but my brother, my elder brother did stand as a Liberal candidate for, I think Tunbridge Wells, he lives in Kent, so he was interested in politics or...

And what about the other one?

No, he hasn't got another career other than being, you know, fruit wholesaling.

So they've stayed in that?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 122 Well, yes, my father inherited the farm and my younger brother stayed with the London business. But I think that's gone now, they've given up, that's been closed, the stand they had in Spitalfields.

Well Spitalfields has changed.

Exactly, it's not there is it?

Very dramatically.

Yes, quite.

Well it's sort of designer things now, and galleries.

It's hilarious. I remember it with the porters and the bushels on their heads, and the swearing that went on.

Did you go down there early in the morning, or not?

Well I didn't go when my father went, but I did often go there, and, I don't know why but, and I remember the people there who were working there. And also my mother's family and my father's family lived near there, they had...although that beautiful Spital Square went they had flats...

Was that bombed?

I think it might have been. I think it might have been. I don't know, but it's not there now. It was lovely actually. There still are some of those Georgian buildings, or, I think the...the Huguenots took them didn't they or something.

Well there are some wonderful buildings round Fournier Street.

That's right, yes. They are like that, they were lovely. Anyway...

There's a brief reference in Norbert's essay, 1973 it says you were associated with an architect.

Oh! Yes. Well again... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 123

Would you like to elaborate on that?

Well, it was one of those involvements which unfortunately didn't really work. I would rather not say who it was.

No, but it is a personal relationship?

But it was, yes, it was somebody, you know, I sort of lived with or, not, we didn't share my studio but we were connecting. But there were very interesting things, I mean, I did focus on architecture, and his, or one of his, you know, great idols was Mies van der Rohe, and he knew quite a lot about all the sort modern architectural, you know, movements, and furniture and so on. And I learnt a lot. And in fact he then made sort of certain suggestions about my work which I tried out but I didn't really develop them and they stopped. But for a while, because he suggested, why not use absolutely straight lines and right-angles and so on, and so I did a series of works which were, one of them I liked very much indeed, which used metal bars and right- angles, and I then wound soft material like felt through the metal, and one John Trew bought which was recently in an auction.

Who?

John Trew, T-R-E-W, he was an architect, through the Arts Centre. And I did really like that. I've got a...it was on a card, you know, a catalogue for an exhibition. I think I showed them in the New Arts Centre, they must have been if I had that one on the card. And some of them I liked very much in their way. But it then got terribly difficult and involved, because he then said they were his ideas, he had suggested them. I mean, the way they worked out was nothing to do with him, I made all the decisions about... And then he said I should call it, you know, my name and his name, and I thought, oh God! So I dropped the whole thing totally, I mean...

And you dropped him as well?

And him. [LAUGHS] You know, it didn't begin as... If on the onset we would have talked about it, but I would still have said no to it, but it sort of... I tried out the thing, and I certainly acknowledged, he never ever was part of the solution or, you know, the work.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 124 I mean I don't know how much you wish to say about your private life. Is there anyone that has been very important to you after Alberto that you might have stayed with or been with for a long time, or...?

Well, I've always, I would really always, throughout my life I would like to have found the partner and stayed with him and had a good life and, you know, a good way of living, and I've always regretted that it didn't happen. It didn't happen, but there have been various involvements, and one was between... Oh yes, in the Eighties, I think the architect went totally out of my life in...I met him in 1970, yes that's right, and then that, after the heart operation in fact, and he ended with the second heart operation. [LAUGHING]

Ten years - it's a substantial time.

Yes. We didn't really live together but, you know, he had his own place and I had mine, but anyway, in various forms it went on. But it sort of ended. And so in the Eighties I had two involvements; one was with a kind of rather star-quality American writer in a way, who was a charming man but unfortunately he died in 19...much...he was only 56 when he died, or, but he died in 19....he died actually in 1986. And then after that I had an enchanting affair with an English painter living in America who was hilarious and great fun, and really a very good painter I think, so I enjoyed, that was very enjoyable.

How can you have an affair with him living in America?

Well he used to come over to England three times a year to see his mother who was alive, and so I would see him. And it absolutely perfectly suited me because there were these visits which were enchanting and then in between I could just get on with my work, so that was a pleasant and nice time. And he was utterly benign and very funny and very nice to know, and he also played jazz rather well, so, it was larky really. And then in between I could just work undisturbed.

Do you think that kind of long-distance relationship suits you?

Well it did in that instance, but now for the first time in my life I'm actually living with somebody. Because when I went to Cornwall to look, the story that, I think, if we are doing this, what has really been very connected to what I've been doing is the situation in the studio, and that also connects with Cornwall, which is that... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 125

We didn't sort of establish when you first moved into, was it Sydney Grove?

Sydney Close.

Sydney Close.

Yes.

When did you first go, in the Sixties?

In '61 I think.

Could you describe the actual space that you had there?

Yes. Well, it was 35 feet long and 27 wide, which is about I think 900 square feet roughly. It was very high, the walls were 17½ feet to the top of the wall, and then the apex, there was a roof, a ceiling which was probably about another 5 or 6 feet, say about, the apex would be about 23 feet high.

Was that glassed up there?

No there were three skylights, and there was a skylight over one end, and it had large 11-foot wide, 6-foot wide double doors, and private parking and a little garden area outside. It was built in 1847 and it was used by painters, I think Queen Victoria's, there was a Baron Machetti or something who taught Princess Beatrice sculpture, and he began to convert them into studios. And I think John Singer Sargent had mine at one time, but other people, Wilson Steer, had them, and they have been occupied by painters since they were built, when I moved in. And...

Who had been before you?

Dyson-Smith, he was a sculptor called Dyson-Smith.

You said something about a balcony.

Yes, well I had a little tiny, the only balcony I had was, I put in...there was the large studio which I've just described, and then behind that there was a smaller sort of Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 126 rather high room, and beyond that was a central corridor, and at one time, later on, the studio opposite mine across the corridor was occupied by Rodrigo, Rodrigo Moynihan, and then lovely Michael Andrews had that for a while till he died, which was I think very sad. And Robert Buhler lived down the corridor, No. 5 or something. And Jim Dine had one in the courtyard. They were lovely, it's a beautiful building, I loved it, and when I moved in it was £3 a week.

Could you live there?

Yes, it was a residential. It was called a mixed hereditament, and you could both live and work.

A what?

A mixed hereditament, which meant you could live and work there. And it was called a residential studio in the lease. So I did live there, it was my only home in fact, and I both lived... And I had an upstairs bedroom built in the large high room at the back and an upstairs bathroom, well it was a shower and a loo upstairs, and then below that was a bath and a loo on the ground floor, and a sitting-room and storage room underneath, so it was really, you know, three areas. And then in the studio itself I had a kitchen, a very small kitchen unit in one corner, and above that were the stairs with a little balcony which went up to the bedroom. But unfortunately, as you know the property prices rose in the late Eighties, and in '89 this terrible new lease began of £17,000 a year, and that was just before the recession.

What had it been before then?

Mm?

What had it been before this?

It had gone up, I think the first lease, in 1961 I had a lease until 1972 when it was, I think, £6 a week, which was what, sort of £300 a year. Then in '72 it had another lease of seventeen years with, I think, three rent reviews in it, and the last rent, the second rent review of that one I think it went up to, oh, something like £60 a week, which is £3,000 a year. And then it jumped from £3,000 for the last three years of that lease to £14,000, that was in '86. And in '89 it was pushed up to £16,800 of which, with ground rent, with service charges was £17,300 a year. And it was also a Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 127 full repairing lease, and so in '89 I sort of had £17,300 a year rent, as well as skylights which were needing repair and general, because I had been there for thirty years nearly by then, and they would come to about £20,000 because they had to be replaced, and things like that. And I had spent all my capital in the years when the recession was taking place and nobody was buying works of art, galleries were shutting, and it was an upwards-only lease, so one couldn't ask them to adjust it to market values. And it just took every penny I had, and so I was literally, I was living from quarter to quarter having to find about £6,000 a quarter, with the rents which were four four every quarter, plus living costs and materials etcetera, and the heating and so on. And, every quarter I never had it, and I used to think, well I had better get the cardboard box then, you know, go on the streets. I was pennyless. And then that's when I asked, you know, the Academy had arranged the Sackler exhibition, and I didn't want to leave before it. So, I mean it was a terrible terrible struggle in those years. And I had hoped...

You didn't have a gallery supporting you either did you?

Well I had Francis Graham-Dixon, I showed in Francis Graham-Dixon in '91. But I then found that he couldn't sell enough work to, I really needed about, at the very minimum £25,000 a year at a time when nobody was buying works of art. So I said to Francis, `I'm afraid I can't just be committed to you; I can give you the odd picture but I have to spread my nets because, you know, I have no source of income.' Anyway, so we were kind of vaguely...

And you weren't teaching of course.

No. And so... Well I hoped the Sackler Galleries exhibition which would restore the balance. And also the landlord was offering a very.....

[BREAK IN RECORDING - INTERRUPTION]

Well I hoped the Sackler Gallery would enable me to buy the lease that was being offered, which was a very reasonable...it was 105 years for £200,000, and really considering how unique the position of those studios, it really was a very very good offer. But I couldn't raise the damn £200,000, and the Sackler didn't...it was a non- seller, it didn't sell unfortunately. The Tate bought a picture and that, I think I received about £24,000, because it was £30,000 less the 20 per cent, so, but it didn't unfortunately, wouldn't have paid for the long lease. And I tried to raise it, and I Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 128 actually did get someone who was offering to pay £150,000 towards it, but it wouldn't have covered, you had to put it into good repair first and all the rest of it. And anyway, at that time Emma Sargent was asking all the studios in Sydney Close on that side if any of us wanted to sell our studios or to reassign them, and it was exactly the right moment unfortunately to receive that sort of thing, because I thought, if I can't buy the long lease, which means really I have enormously valuable property and also somewhere where I don't have to worry about rent any longer, if I couldn't somehow have paid for it, I didn't want to spend the rent of my life struggling to earn, you know, £25- to £30,000 a year, every year, with all now my two, you know, physical disabilities of the diabetes and my heart condition, and I thought the stress of that was really ridiculous. And the fact that it...it was getting depressing because it needed, it was dilapidated. So for the sake of the studio as well, it... And what I rather liked about Emma was, she was the same age I was when I moved into it, and somehow it seemed to be rather sort of, you know, a symbolic gesture to pass it on to her. And she offered me a price which was really above its market value because of the state it was in. So, it was still unfortunately not enough to buy something elsewhere, and because of that I decided to look in Cornwall, because I thought you could, and you could in fact get some buildings as low as £15,000, although you have to do things to them. And certainly I had enough money to have bought something which, say, was £70- or £80,000, around there.

But surely you were going from one extreme rather to another weren't you?

What, with that...?

I mean having lived in London all your life...

Yes.

And being very much a London person, despite your love of the country...

Yes.

To suddenly go to...

Well the reason for it was really property values, the fact that I wanted a large space to work in, and I didn't have enough money from the sale of the studio to buy one. And I never ever wanted to be at the mercy of landlords again. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 129

But don't you feel you could have got something that was nearer London? I mean do you feel that you've gone too far?

Well the reason I went there was because there were people I still knew down there, and so I would be amongst people, you know, I could connect to, perhaps in a good working situation with certain advantages of the landscape, which is sort of wild and extraordinary. And then, connecting to kind of the visitors who, I don't know, people do come down to see the Tate at St Ives. There was a sort of, an art connection to the place as well. Anyway I went really to see, I didn't make my mind up, I thought I would just go and see what... So I went for a holiday in May - well not a holiday, it was intention, but also anyway, to...and I stayed with Rose Hilton.

May what, which year?

In May 1994, which was after the Sackler Galleries. And someone down there fell in love with me, it was very unexpected. [LAUGHS] And then I went back to...I didn't...I mean I hardly saw him; he saw me at a private view. It was all a sort of fantasy really because he... He had an image of me of the way I looked at that private view of the sort of person I was, which is not terribly close to what I really am like. I think he thought I was very remote and self-contained and, God knows, anyway... But he began to write these rather extraordinary letters to me, which did interest me, they were odd. And then I...I sort of... And then out of the blue he asked me to marry him, and that was absurd as he hardly knew me. I did meet him once before I came back. And so, I said I can't possibly marry you, I don't know you, but I would be, you know, perhaps we could find...see how we got on or whatever. And then he came to London and I went down there. And it did seem to me quite a possibility really of living with him. He's a painter and a sculptor, and he also used to do from the Sixties onwards performance art, live art. So, anyway, I then, I sold the studio to Emma which I was going to do anyway I think, and so I went down there. Oh, I felt like a sort of covered wagon, you know, those women who went out... [LAUGHS] Anyway...

Did you move in with him?

Yes, I did in fact. And...

Are we going to have a name for this person, or [INAUDIBLE]? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 130

I think not quite at this stage, but it'll I'm sure be quite well known eventually. And there I am, still there. But I'm not sure if it really is all that suitable, although it does, it's very good in many ways. He's very supportive of my work. I like his work. I'm now going to be in a live art performance. [LAUGHING]

Really? That will be a bit...have you ever done anything like that?

I did one with, he did a previous one, and Rose Hilton and I both joined in with it. And again, what I rather feel at the moment is, I'm in a sort of river that I have no control over where I'm going a certain way, because I don't, although I live with him and I have two studios down there, the Porthmeor and a large industrial unit in which to do large paintings and store the large paintings, and a beautiful studio on the beach which is ravishing in a way, what you see from it and what you can do in it, but, and the barn which has got certain...I don't actually have my own home down there.

Where is all your stuff, in...?

At the moment it's all in... Well the domestic stuff is in the barn and it's kind of got, you know, merged with what he's got. But it's only really big enough for one person, the barn, that he has; he has an L-shaped barn and one part of it's his work place and the other is living area. And one can perfectly comfortably live with him in it in a sense, but there's no privacy for me and there's no room that I really feel, or space that is really my own. And I also quite like to have something in my own name anyway. And I'm not sure, his great interest is philosophy and I know absolutely nothing about it, and I've tried to read philosophy. I mean I sort of, in this performance I had to do a recording where I had to say `phenomenological' something, and... [LAUGHING] It's...I can't really sort of crack philosophy. I know some people do, can get... I kind of read it and there are so many words and so many obscure thoughts, and you would really have to give an enormous amount of time to...

It demands a certain cast of mind I think.

Yes, yes, and perhaps one ought to have started young with it, I don't know.

So what studio space have you got? You've got the Porthmeor...

The Porthmeor is... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 131

Is that large?

It's 50 feet long by 17 inches wide, and it's...

17 inches wide?

No no, sorry, 17 feet wide. [LAUGHING]

You could only stand like...sideways.

You would need to be really thin. [LAUGHING] 17 inches wide. It has a view of the sea, which is rather wonderful. It has a little balcony where the sun shines when you're having your lunch so you can sit in the sun.

Is it up or on the beach?

It's up, yes, you go up some steps, so unfortunately, it would be lovely if you... You could have a rope ladder perhaps, but I mean, I don't have a rope ladder, but you can walk to the beach quite quickly from there. And then, it's very near the new Tate St Ives and everything else there practically. And I quite like my neighbours there, and it's near the print workshop, and I began to do some etchings, which Norman Akroyd asked me to do at the beginning of the year, RA etching part of the Schools, but...

Have you done much print-making in the past?

I've done prints but I haven't done etchings, and Norman said what I did is not an etching, it's embossed work, we just dug into the paper as it were and pressed shapes into the paper. And then I drew a line by hand afterwards rather and that's not an etching, but... I took a course in etching in the print workshop with Roy Walker, and I will probably, I became a member of the print workshop so I'll probably at the end of the year do some etchings again there. But Penbeagle is a great industrial unit, it's 3,000 square feet, 72 feet by 40-something, and it's got huge doors, 12 feet wide, and high, pretty high. You can drive a lorry into it. And parking space for twelve lorries if you want to park twelve lorries. And it's got a garden, a beautiful garden with lovely shrubs in it and things, overlooking, overlooked by a moor, because it's right at the back of the industrial site. And it would be a wonderful place, and it's on sale and I would buy it, but it's unfortunately next to a builders' merchant and it's a nightmare Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Page 132 because the noise, it's constantly huge lorries, those lorries you can't believe are so big come up. And then there's a dreadful fork-lift with a siren. Oh! so the racket is unbelievable. The only time when it's wonderful is Saturday at 12 o'clock until Monday morning because then they're not there. So I don't think I will buy it unfortunately. But I have done these RA pictures there in it, and I'm going to sort of sort out the last of the big pictures, I've got the sort of [INAUDIBLE], I'll do perhaps one or two more. And then I will give it up I think in September, the end of September. But, I just can't make my mind up really about Cornwall, whether to go on staying there.

Have you missed London?

Well I miss London immensely. I miss my friends, and I miss the exhibitions I constantly saw, I miss that sort of, you know, being fed in that way. One can come up, lots of people do keep going backwards and forwards.

I would think it's pretty tiring going up.

It's a hell of a journey. I mean it's really, it's quicker to go to New York, I really do think it is. And it is tiring, exactly.

Unless you can fly, and I don't know how you would do that.

I think you, you can't do it easily I don't think. I think it's not...there is an airplane in Penzance but I think it goes to the Scilly Isles, it's going the wrong way. You keep seeing Concorde go by but it's a bit high up to get on it.

End of Track 10: Tape 5: Side B Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 133 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A

When I got Sydney Close I had been for three years in Glebe Place, and it was only a three-year agreement so I had to look for another place, and in the `Evening Standard' one day I saw a studio for sale and I could see it at 4 o'clock. And the agents were Evans in Battersea. So at 4 o'clock I was taken to 12 Sydney Close, and immediately I saw it I had to have it, because it was a marvellous space. And I was lucky, I had got it for, I think it was £750 premium, and the rent was £3 a week.

Wonderful.

Mm. And it was a lovely, wonderful studio, and I did, I think, you know, some of my best work in it, so, it was heartbreaking really to lose it.

I mean if you, if it hadn't been for the money question you wouldn't have left?

Oh no, I was very happy in it, and I, also for... All my work was in its walls somehow I had done in there, and it was sort of a place where I was used to working in and living in, and I would have been very happy to spend the rest of my life in it. But it was crazy to try to find up to £30,000 a year plus £25,000 repair forever, and then with the rent reviews going up, and there would be...the landlords are very rapacious, and so, I... I was really working for the landlord, and I didn't want to, and I felt it would really interfere with my work, as it had because I couldn't really concentrate with all that going on too well.

It must have been, I mean apart from fearfully uprooting to go down to St Ives, do you feel that it's had an influence on your work, I mean do you think the place has had its...?

Well, I mean, I was told by, not my previous psychoanalyst but an American analyst who is a friend, that it's very very disturbing to lose a home that's been, you know, your home for a long time. And I didn't think it was true, but my God it was true, because I was totally... I went down there like a sort of stunned mullet, I was sort of so, you know... I don't know, it was awful. And then, what had happened was, we went, we stopped at Dartington Hall en route, which is rather beautiful, and I think if my home was going to be Dartington Hall I would have quite enjoyed it, with those lovely gardens. But we then went on to Cornwall, to a diabolically cold and windy and wet winter, and the barns weren't finished, and there was no floor, I mean it was Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 134 just concrete we were walking on, and the ceiling wasn't insulated, and the windows had only just been put in, and there was no heating, and I don't think there was a lavatory. I literally felt that I was in Bosnia. Well the first night I was there - because I had visited it in the summer and all these...it didn't take much imagination, but the actual experience of being in it, and the fact it was totally, everything was all over the place, there was no order, and I just said, I can't live here, I can't live in these conditions, I really can't, so I must go to a hotel, this is impossible. And then he said, you know, `Try' or, I don't know what it was, so I thought, oh well, I'll try. [LAUGHS] A nightmare. It was...I really did feel I was a refugee or living in a refugee sort of camp or something. Anyway gradually things got better and eventually a floor, which he built himself, he put in a floor and he raised the ceiling, and we were having electricity put up, and the lavatory was installed, and so gradually it became more civilised, but it's never really been comfortable. But I did get the Porthmeor studio early in the following year in sort of January I think, and it took some time to get that...

Who administers those?

It's the Borlase Smart Trust, and it is administered by a committee of whom, I think the Tate St Ives and the Tate Gallery London are trustees. And I wish I could have had it immediately, but anyway I did get it in, and it was in use by sort of March really. Of course, it had two great disadvantages when I moved in, which Karl knows about, he told me about, was, the floor is just boards and below are the fishermen, and they've got wonderful sort of ocean voices, and this yelling, you can hear every word they say, and they sang and they swore and they played music. And it was really as if... And then above me was Hyman Segal, who I don't think has ever sat down in his life, he just walks about, shuffles about all day long, and pushes things about.

Who's this?

He's above the studio, and he's a man, a painter, or artist, called Hyman Siegel[ph]. And he lives with a woman who was a dancer, and Karl said in his day she did flamenco dancing in high heels above, and Karl said he had to go out every day until 5.30 until they all went. And the noise was horrendous. And so, we then put, God knows it's still up, but we put eighty bags of sand on the floor with chip-board above it, which insulated the noises below, and then we also, they have beautiful rafters which I was sorry to lose but we also insulated the ceiling so that, although you get Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 135 some noise it's nothing, it became workable in, you know, it was nothing like the noise when I arrived.

So is it Karl's old studio then?

Mm, yes.

Oh I've been in it.

Yes. Well it's very much brighter now, it's sort of, it's been painted, and people who knew it before say that it's sort of, you know, it's much brighter, or whiter now than when Karl had it. Anyway, and, so...

Has...sorry.

And then, I managed to get a marvellous gas heater from, recommended by British Gas, which is used to heat churches and things like that, and that...so I used to long to get to the studio from the barns, I could go and... And then eventually... So, what was the question then?

Whether, I was about to say...

The work?

The spirit of the place would come into the work.

Well, I mean to begin with I was really in a very distressed state, because I did find it difficult. I hadn't thought I would find it so devastating to lose my own studio. I also found that the circumstances, you know, the way I was living, unfortunately didn't sort of recompense what, you know, what I had lost, because it was exceedingly difficult and uncomfortable to start with. And I wasn't too sure about the relationship, because of, well what was unexpected, the situation with the 10-year-old child that visited every half term, and term holidays, which is about six times a year, but who is very very jealous of my being there, and I really thought, what have I done? But it has improved since, and the working conditions, I've now got the very large Porthmeor, Penbeagle, and I think we've more or less all come to terms to a certain extent with each other. And there are very good things in the kind of shared life that are also helpful to my work. And what I think has come into the work is, the Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 136 landscape is quite extraordinary, and the light and the colours, and I hope quite soon, because I've never really been able, last year I did try to do some watercolours but it's going to take me a long time to use them in a way I would like to.

Have you used them in the past much?

I used to when I did landscape, but I think I used oils then for landscape. For some reason, I don't know because it's near the sea, I sort of feel watercolours are more appropriate. But I haven't, didn't get the sort of effects I wanted. I did get some catalogues of Turner, and one day I actually thought I was Turner, because I was looking at a sunset and it was so much what Turner would have painted that, I looked at it so intensely I suddenly felt I was Turner looking at it. Of course, you know, one couldn't but think of Turner looking at it. There are wonderful effects down there of sort of, you know, of light and shade and colour. And the landscape, which I didn't like when I...I was moaning the whole time, I mean it must have been awful to be in my company. I moaned about how cold it was, how wet it was, and then it was...I said, `Where are the trees? There's not a single tree, there's not...' All you could see were these sort of bent things which were battered by the wind; there wasn't a tree in sight where we were. And it was desolate, and freezing, and sort of... And I didn't know anybody there, and... And Rose was miles away, so, and anyway, it was a very difficult winter. But things have been now happening. There are certain patterns on the beach which are sandwiches that are caused by the tide, and when the tide goes out they are visible. And running across them are inlets of water which make a sort of grid in a kind of way, but they have got a very wonderful quality, and I'm somehow trying to incorporate them into my work. And also just the movement there and the strength of the, you know, the landscape is I think getting into the work. So, it is having an effect.

What about the sea?

Well, I find the sea quite magical, and the effect of light on it and the colours of it, but apart, I haven't tried to paint the sea because, unless it would be part of a landscape painting.

Sometimes there's a sort of wave-like quality in your paintings though.

Well that...

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 137 Bursting on a shore.

I have seen older works of mine that look as if they could have been done there before I went there, because they, I can recognise things in, when I look at old works that are reminiscent of, well not reminiscent but have the look of what I see when I go out or look at things there. And so, I think too that, another thing which is very curious, because it's a kind of side effect in a way, but there's a certain type of painting down there which on its own I wouldn't be terribly interested in, but if it could be, it's a certain very painterly use of watercolour and paints that interests me, and I think that certain things from it might come into my work, I don't know. One of my neighbours and friends now is Willy Barnes-Graham, and I think some of her, I really enjoy some of her work, and there are certain drawings and paintings both early and, you know, recent ones which connect to St Ives which also probably are affecting me a bit because they give me a lot of pleasure to look at her work.

Is she living down there permanently now?

Well she has a home both there and in Scotland.

Does she sort of still commute?

She what?

She still commutes between the two?

She commutes between the two. And she is thinking of giving up St Ives because obviously it's changed dreadfully since when she first knew it. But she is there at the moment. And she also, I very much value, she comes, I sometimes ask her to come and look at recent work and I very much value what she says about them, you know, I like...they more or less kind of coincide with what... And we began what we call a Forum which I think has now served its purpose and possibly won't continue, but there were apparently other people living there who weren't seeing anyone else, and we decided to hold, you know, have a place where we could meet if we wished to, and get to know each other. So, that was rather fun and successful really because we found out who was there and what they were doing, and I think everyone indirectly or directly has benefited from that. So, there's now a sense more... And I have a new neighbour at Porthmeor, Ralph Freeman, whose work has got quite, a very good quality in it I think and who comes to the Forum. He's hilariously funny because, it Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 138 suited something in my...I mean he is almost a sort of genius comic pessimist. We were once talking about, at the Forum, about painting and what people felt about their painting, and he was saying, Roy Walker was saying what a pleasure it was to paint, and Ralph really said, `Pleasure?' He found no pleasure in painting. You were lucky, he said, if you have two minutes' pleasure in six months. [LAUGHING]

You would agree with that?

Well, I mean, having been through a very difficult time, in that sort of, you know, semi-gallows humour, it kind of, I felt, you know, it was suitable for some of the moods I've gone through now. But, anyway, it's an experience, and it could, I think, affect my work in a way that would be interesting perhaps. Because there was something, as I look through the old works, of what I now see that has been in the old works; of certain big gestures, and also just, the texture of paintings and some of the shapes kind of seem suitable in others.

What about the work that you did when you lived in Zennor for a year, does it come back to any of that?

Well no, because that work was far more textural than what I'm doing now, and relied on texture I think. I do remember once, apparently Delia Heron burnt a cake and Patrick said, `Rush it down to Sandra and she can put it on a picture'. [LAUGHING] So...

Would you describe a typical day for us?

There?

Yes.

Yes, well I wake up very early, usually with the light, and then I slowly get myself together and have a bath or wash, which one is now able to do there, and then I try to remember what... And one of my difficulties with having three different places is to remember what's in which and what I need to take from one to another, and I take some time to sort that out. I usually, by the time we've had breakfast, and then there's a cat that appears to be fed from somewhere and seeing to things like that, and sorted out what I am taking with...I usually, by then, wait for the post which is about 8.30, because I do get a lot of correspondence that has to be dealt with in one way or Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 139 another, and so I collect that up if it's arrived. And then I'm driven over to, either, whichever studio I'm going to, either Porthmeor or Penbeagle.

You don't drive?

No, I don't. I did drive, I had a licence, and I drove a Jeep in the Sixties, but I haven't driven now for 22 years and I think I would be pretty dangerous on the roads really, so, if I do get a home of my own there I might begin to learn again.

It's the kind of place where a car is probably very handy.

Oh absolutely. Well essential I would think. But in a certain way I have a car because, that's one of the great kindnesses I've found with the man I'm living with, he will, without any question take me anywhere at any time I want to go to, and bring me back if I wish it. I do sometimes use the taxi service, but I do find it a bit of a strain. It's a bit of indulgedness to talk to the driver or not talk to the driver; either is a strain, either to talk to or not to talk to. I therefore am very appreciative of being driven there, and he doesn't seem to mind. So I get to whichever one I'm going to. And then I begin to...

What about getting between the two?

Oh then I get a taxi, because it's...I think that's...I've always felt during the day when he's begun to work that's too much; it's before he has started or after he's finished that I usually... And he has the whole day to himself usually, so do I. And then, I then begin to sort out where, which place I'm in, what I'm about to do, and have a look at what I have done, if I want to go on with something. And so it sort of begins to get settled into... Or if I have correspondence. I do like to get rid of it at once if I can, because I forget about it otherwise and then there's that nagging feeling that something hasn't been... And although people say, don't do that because you lose interest, I have to get it out at once if I can, then it's out of the way. And I have a phone in all three places in fact; there's a phone in the barn, there's a phone in both of the other places, so I sometimes get phone calls, or phone about things I need. And so, my best working time is in the morning, and then I usually stop to eat something, and then I'll...

Do you go out to eat, or take something with you?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 140 Well, I can, in both places I have got a fridge and something to cook on and a kettle and so on, and washing up facilities, so I sometimes do one or... But if it's a good, a nice day, nearby, especially - well really only in Porthmeor can one do it, but there is either the Tate Gallery cafe which out-of-doors overlooks the sea, or one right on the beach. But I'm rather put off that one because I went there last week and whatever I was eating, I was attacked by a gull who knocked the coffee over and snatched my sandwich out of my... [LAUGHING] I've got doubts now about continuing to use that one. But I can have a very pleasant lunch in Porthmeor by sitting on the balcony and just taking a stool or something to put all the stuff on and eating there. And then I will, I try, because I am supposed to, you know, to walk in the afternoon a bit if possible. And one of my, another of my neighbours is Bob Crosley who is 83 but continues to ski every year, and he's a great walker and he has dragged me along the cliff path. [LAUGHING] But he's much quicker than I am and so, we don't often do it. And then, I sort of then go through... I have a rest at some time in the afternoon and do the `Times' crossword or something, and then, I then you know, sort out the ideas of the day, or what has or hasn't happened. I might go on with what I was doing, or make arrangements about various things that have to be done, kind of collections or whatever. And there are quite a lot of phone calls to London about small exhibitions I get involved with, like Angela Flowers has got works on paper, or the Academy has, those are the people who have bought things in, the RAs, how to get them to them and so on and so on. And then I am collected whenever, after sort of 6.30 onwards, and then we usually...and I've quite often done some shopping in St Ives during the day. And then we make a meal together, and just talk about this and that really. We might watch television later on, or read.

Would you work on more than one picture at once?

Yes.

Do you have a sort of whole...?

Well, if there's one that is really, kind of, you know, I'm into, I will probably stay with that one until I reach a stage in it where it needs something more but I'm not quite sure what to do with it, and I would then probably leave it for a bit and then go on to another one. So there are, yes, they overlap in that way. And there's one at the moment in Penbeagle that is large and difficult that Willy came to see. But she loves a 4-foot square one, she thinks it's a very good painting that I'm doing and that's got a very difficult area which, you know, it's that awful thing where you can wreck the Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 141 whole thing if... And so I am deliberating over, both the large one and the smaller one in Penbeagle. And I've got a group of the ridge paintings, there are two that I'm also working on in Porthmeor. It's very confusing I find because I've never in my life not lived where I worked and had my work at hand, and so I have to go from Porthmeor to Penbeagle to the barns. I sometimes, I truly think, which one am I in now? And it's trying a bit.

But if you live with it then you're seeing it at all different times of the day and night aren't you?

Yes, exactly.

And that's probably quite helpful isn't it?

Well...

Or is it helpful to get away from it?

Well what I find is, any place I sort of, you know, well either the studios, whichever one I enter into I then have to, there's an initial getting into it as it were, or getting used to being in it, and feeling, I've got things where I want in it. So, I never go straight in and work. And there's a certain, getting myself accustomed to being in that studio at that time of day or whatever it is, or in that light or, so it's... What was the question? I know it was to do with...

Well, I mean, I don't know whether it was helpful or not to live with the work or helpful to be separated from it.

I don't really find it helpful to be separated from it. I've been all my life used to being with it always, and where I live, so it is something I'm finding uncomfortable and confusing and disturbing a bit; it's not ideal. I do long for a place to work in and live in, and why we can't do this at the moment I think is that because the barns have taken two years to be converted, and because it's only now, about two months at the most, that he's been able to work in them, it seems wrong to try to uproot it all and sell it and have somewhere else. So I think there has to be a proper consideration for some use. And I can either get a place of my own which eventually, if we decide, he could join me in, but to do that single-handed, to buy a place big enough for two, to both Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 142 live and work in, now I find the prices for those sort of places are not very different from London down there.

No, that's what I was wondering when you say that you want to go for property down there, but on the other hand...

Because there are barns. A friend of mine has got a huge freehold chapel which is enormous, for £25,000 freehold. Another in Penzance, another has got a huge and wonderful house for £75,000 behind a church in St Ives. Two other people we know bought masses of barns in a farm for £40,000. So, if you keep looking and if, you know, you're lucky, I think they still exist, but it's sheer luck really to find them. The norm is for them to be much more. And certainly, you know, you must expect about, something around £150-ish at least for a big place now, that's...

Do you get your chap to come and have a look at your work as well?

Yes.

I mean is he useful to talk about it?

Yes. And, yes I do, but, some of his comments have made me think I shouldn't, because he has liked, you know, that awful thing that people sometimes say, `Don't touch it' or, and so that is a bit... But on the other hand, I'm interested. Unfortunately I've always done it really, and I...I'm not sure it's a good idea.

What, asking other's opinions?

Mm. Of sort of, at certain moments wanting to know what the reactions are.

Well if you ask I suppose you have to take the consequences.

Yes exactly, you can't have it both ways.

But the whole process has perhaps slowed down then, of your work; do you feel you are doing less because of the adjustment you have to make for the time?

You mean to go from one studio to the other?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 143 And also the adjustment when you get there, to get into the feeling of it. Do you feel you are doing less work?

Well, I do have quite strongly the sense that I am not working enough hours during each day, but then when you think of Roger who, God knows, came up from London to the Academy back to the studio and still had a huge body of work, you know, it can be done if you... I mean not the number of hours but the amount of work that he produced.

Yes, but he, one feels that the work that he was doing in a sense because he was working from a motif, I mean you don't have the same process of having to think of what you are going to be doing, in a sense you're just doing it.

Well I mean, I have longed from time to time, in fact I think really a large part of my career has been spent longing to find the formula where I sort of, it's all, all one has to do is to make certain selections within a framework, you know, where there is as you are saying a motif or a method of which where you just work within. So there are variations within that method but you don't have to invent the method every time practically.

But on the other hand, if you adapt or adopt a formula then all you are doing is producing the same painting to a certain extent.

Exactly, exactly, mm.

And if you haven't found that then all to your good.

Mm. I mean, what I would be satisfied with at the moment, but, I don't know, I mean sometimes I just don't have the strength to do it, and to do all the other things that seem to be part of the day... I mean I do think, the walk is essential for my health, because if you don't have the walk then it affects you etcetera etcetera, you know. I mean in my Russian roulette life that I'm living with my health, you know, I really have to make some concessions to dealing with it, or doing things about it, and walking is one of them.

But the walk can be part of the work because you are looking aren't you?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 144 Yes, it could be part of the work, because you're looking, quite, and moving, and... I always think there's something biological in painting; I feel there's a sort of biological movement in painting that is...and also in certain form anyway, so that walking, even just the effort of, the movement of walking is part of it as well as looking. But, what I long for is to get this idea clear of how to make the idea work, because all the things I'm trying to sort of work to in a certain extent but aren't exactly what I want... I wish I had the Polaroids to show you so you would know. And then, the other is, the ever, the Holy Grail I'm looking for, of bringing colour into it, in God knows what way.

When you start on a, I mean a blank canvas, what would you...you wouldn't draw on it or anything, in charcoal or...?

No I don't. What I do, and in fact if only one could leave it like what I start with, it's ravishing very often. I will use something like lining paper, and then I will have an idea, it might even be from an idea in my head or a vague idea which works out as it goes along, or something from the Polaroids which appeals to me which I feel I could work from. But then having decided what certain placings are going to be or might be I then use, I cut, I cut out lining paper that follow those ideas and those shapes and then I staple them to a bare canvas. And I can tell you the effect of the colour of lining paper and the canvas and the shadows is ravishing. If one could leave it like that, you know, every picture is a masterpiece. Sadly I...

Is the paper coloured or do you paint it?

No, it's that sort of off-white, slightly cream-coloured lining paper.

And would you put any paint on it?

Occasionally I might if I want a coloured area, but I really am much more interested at that stage in the shape.

Forms, yes.

Yes.

And so, I mean it's basically monochrome?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Page 145 Yes, to start with. And then, if it then begins to look like proportionally right or close to the intention, I will then start to make it substantial, which will either mean, I will mark out where I'm going to paint it... What I very often do is, having then got the dispositions right, I will then either draw round what's there or mask round what's there, and then very faintly paint in the, you know, the total of what has been there. And then from there I can sort of get a flat as it were without the shadows idea, and I've got two pictures like at the moment that are very interesting in fact, but now they need, and this is the difficult bit, they need the third stage, which is making them, you know, substantial so they're not just thin lines, rather like, you know, it's an under- painting.

End of Track 11: Tape 6: Side A Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 146 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B

.....the third phase.

Oh what, the whole lot?

No no, the third phase...well I mean...

Well the third phase is...the third phase. The third phase is, when the under-painting as it were is then revealed, is to decide then how to make the work substantial, and what method to use, what sort of paint to put on it, how to put the paint on it and what the colours are going to be. And that's the very difficult bit because the first bits are just sort of, a pleasure and easy.

And so that's when you've got to add depth in a way?

Yes. Yes.

And you can't have any depth when you're doing it with the masking paper, I mean with the lining paper?

No. Well yes, you have to add the actual texture, because that will affect it, and also the colours you are going to use. And again, any sort of refinements or, you know, things to make the lines come alive and so on, because if you've done it with masking tape you will just have masking tape lines. So, and it's very often, you know, it's almost coloured with, you know, over-painted, you paint over it. But there are two, I can actually see them now, that I am working on which are like that and which are waiting for when I go back. But the other thing I've tried all my life..... [BREAK IN RECORDING] Yes, I've always tried to do, is to find a way where you don't have to suffer, where it's, you know, it's all sort of worked out, a method that will carry through the painting. But this, unfortunately there's always, however well it may start or easily, there's a stage where it's very difficult to make the decisions of what should come next, which unfortunately I can't avoid in those stages, a sort of certain painfulness at the effort of trying to decide what to do and what should be done.

And that's the bit that isn't so enjoyable?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 147 No. I mean, I do remember, again occasionally I read things other artists write that interest me. I mean, I think Lucian wrote somewhere that every picture when he thinks he's solved how to paint a picture, he finds that when he starts again it's like beginning at the beginning again and he's got to work it all out again, how that particular thing is going to work and so on. And I think Henry Moore even said something, as if you had never done anything before in your life when you do a new work. So...I don't know.

It sounds a bit of a nightmare doesn't it.

Mm.

Just to go back to the important relationships in your life, you sort of missed out the bit between Alberto Burri and 1970, so there must perhaps possibly have been somebody in that period.

I see. Well Alberto Burri, when was he, in the Fifties wasn't it, yes.

Yes, early Fifties.

It sort of went through the Fifties. I think that, well I know that, I do know, in my twenties, which was when I...well I was mid-twenties I suppose by the time I came back. When I went to Italy I was 22. Yes, well, until I was about 33 I really didn't want any serious involvements, because that was the time which was when I had the most energy and the most determination or compulsion to work out a style. And I avoided any, you know, it was really total concentration on work then during that period. I saw lots of people, but I really did feel I couldn't get involved, seriously involved with anyone, so there was no one who was, you know, someone I was living with or something at the time. And I think then, oh something curious happened, because when I was in my early thirties I then very much felt I really had to have a child if I was going to have a child, because otherwise it gets rather late and dangerous for the child. I think Mongoloid children are very often born after 35, so... I then went around looking as if I wanted, I think, having...nobody would come near me! [LAUGHS] It was hilarious. And so, that was a sort of disaster really, that... But anyway... And then who, I can't...let's see who. 1970, where does that bring us up to?

You would have been... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 148

33.

33 in 1960. 35

No, 1960 I would have been 35, yes.

35 in 1960.

That's right, yes. So, 1960. 1960 there was, yes, there was a ghastly, a time with the person who slashed the picture who, that was really the sort of thing you read in the papers now, people going to court about being harassed or whatever, it was a difficult time then.

But did that go on all through the Sixties?

It went on for quite, quite a long time, and that was when, the end of it was when the...

'69.

Was when the picture was slashed. And then I think the real culmination of it was the need to have a heart operation really, because it wasn't easy that thing. And then after that was the architect in the Seventies, and then after that was the American writer.

Who doesn't have a name either.

I really rather...

No it's fine, it's fine. No it's up to you, I'm just curious, inevitably.

And then after that was the painter who was such fun. And then, now, there's the sculptor, painter, performer.

You never got involved in any performance or happenings in the Sixties or anything like that?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 149 No, in fact I never really was very interested in them, but I still don't feel that it's natural to me, but there...I do feel that there is an aspect of them that I do rather enjoy. I mean it's in a curious way part of my life, because I really do feel literally at sea a bit at the moment. I feel I'm un-anchored, that I am at the mercy of the tide in a way, that I'm very open because I..I don't really quite know what's going to happen to me, and so, the performance is a bit like that, it's a thing I've never done before, and it's something I don't really, I don't have really a great interest in, but which I have found an interest in having watched some, and doing it is extending it in a certain sort of way, or unusual. I went for a walk the other day which I enormously enjoyed because I suddenly felt like going out, it was a wonderful afternoon, from Penbeagle, and then I sort of saw something that looked interesting to me, and from then I sort of went to one place to another, not quite knowing where any of it led, so every bit of it was sort of risky and a bit, God knows, of, what would I find at the end of it. And I did that for about an hour, and the light was very wonderful, and I kept finding extraordinary and interesting things as I went along. So I wasn't following a path, it wasn't a cliff path or something, it was simply going through gates that seemed to go through somewhere else. And, I had a vague idea in mind but it was an absolutely unknown walk, the places I was walking along. And I found it absolutely enormously exhilarating when I got back.

It wasn't unnerving?

Mm?

It wasn't unnerving?

No, it was just sort of strange, and I thought, you know, what am I doing? I don't know where I am, what I'm doing quite, and I thought, well, yes but I want to go on. And I rather like that sense, because you know how careful my paintings sometimes have been, when I've worked out every stage of them; it was suddenly not working anything out, I was just seeing what happened as I went along. It was rather like a spontaneous painting in a sort of way. And I did find it very enjoyable, and I think that's what's happening to me a bit in St Ives, and I sort of feel, although it is...it doesn't make one feel very secure, it is perhaps extending, you know, and hopefully something will go into the work. It's taking a sort of risk all the time.

Is there anything that you've seen, an exhibition or anything that you've seen recently that's really excited you in that way, in a similar way? Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 150

An exhibition?

Yes, I mean on somebody else's work. I mean you said that, you know, you liked going, one of the things you miss from London is going round the exhibitions.

Yes.

I just wondered if it was, you just liked to see a lot of different things or whether, you know, some things stuck out, you know, in the last couple of years let's say that you've seen [INAUDIBLE].

Well, no, I think, I like to see exhibitions which I feel, you know, extend my, extending in a way, that it takes me beyond what I know or what I'm doing. I haven't seen things in St Ives that actually do that but I have seen certain works, I've enjoyed Willy Barns-Graham's work, and I see some drawings, and knowing the landscape, attempts at landscape in some of the local exhibitions which occasionally interest me. And the Tate St Ives, most of the pictures there are fairly familiar to me because I know those people's work. Paul Feiler had an exhibition I quite enjoyed earlier this year. But one of the...I think at the Academy, which I connect to, I've got to have work in, I do very much enjoy Gillian Ayres' work, and I like Jennifer, I both like her and her work, Jennifer Durrant's work. And I'm always interested to see what John Hoyland has done. I think, he's got one I quite like this year, in I think Gallery 8, one of the end galleries. But there's no sort of great wow! exhibition, you know, that I've seen that has really deeply affected me really.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

According to a quote I came across, you referred to yourself when talking to Sarah Kent as an academic abstract painter. What did you mean by that?

Well, it must have been something to do with what, my mood at the time, but I think I meant that, I don't really know now because I can't remember having made that remark but...

1978.

Yes. '78, which was... Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 151

Just as you were doing this PVC thing, and it would have been the Hayward annual?

The Hayward annual was, yes, was 1978. Was it to do with that?

I think it was.

Do you mean when I used the covering of the painting, when it came back?

Afterwards I think, yes. Oh you may have said this before.

It sounds rather self-derogatory. I don't know, I mean I can't think what made me say it. I think it meant that I was interested in what I felt to be to me the principal or the basis of a certain type of abstract art which is Cézanne and then Hofmann's use of pictorial space. And I think those were, certainly Hofmann's, or what I thought to be Hofmann's, through Nicholas Carone's, way of using, which I do think does associate with Cézanne, of movement of colour and space. So, I may have thought, meant it to be that I was using a method of abstract painting which was a recognisable basis of abstract painting in that sense; perhaps one could use the word academic.

Well, like classic perhaps.

Classic, yes, or, yes, or traditional, you know, abstract structures in painting.

So you've never been tempted to suddenly start being a figurative artist again?

Well, yes I am, because I really regret throughout the entire time I didn't keep drawing, and I do think it would have...

You mean life drawing?

Well any drawing, drawing anything, not sitting in front of a model necessarily but that as well perhaps, as Hockney draws, anything that's around him, you know, or in landscape, drawing landscapes, or... I mean now we have horses near us and drawing those. And, I think in order to draw you really have to have a sort of apparatus, apparatus to draw with, you know, got used to it being part of you so it's there, you know, either in your pocket...

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 152 And practise it every day.

Well, I mean having it on you and having a pencil and so on. So, you know, you've got, just as the way you use, you know, you get used to using your materials, so it's a available to be used when you want it. Because why I didn't do it, it was almost deliberate, I felt that I wanted to give my full concentration to abstract painting and that if I was getting interested in drawing I would sort of defuse what my major energy was. And in St Ives we have actually gone to some of the life classes that are held there weekly, more than weekly, are available to use there. But I have also tried landscape painting, last year anyway. But somehow, I don't know what it is, it's either habit or mood, I still am not doing it or as much as I want to.

There was a drawing in the catalogue for the RA show.

Oh yes, well that was in New York when I stayed in New York with a friend in '84 I think, I'm not sure of the date of the drawing, is it...?

I thought it was a bit later, '87 or something.

No, I don't think... Well yes it might have been. Yes, because...

'78.

'78. Well, a neighbour from Sydney Close moved to New York and she was staying in the Carlisle Hotel at that time but she, I think she hadn't yet got to know people in New York so she invited me to come over for a while. And we went to the 57th Street, there was a school there which you could both draw and work in, and I worked there and drew from the model there, and I think that drawing was done there in New York, because she then didn't have her own studio, that's right, she hadn't moved into where she was going to... I rather enjoyed working in New York. I did some collages there that they liked and I liked very much in fact, so it was a good... I think, one of my regrets is that when I went to the Saidenberg in '58, was it? No.

'57.

'57. I really have since, although I did have a year in St Ives which meant a lot to me, but I do regret I didn't stay there, and that was a very exciting time there.

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 153 Yes, I mean you chose to base yourself in London almost exclusively. I mean, you think you should have varied it a bit, do you?

Well I think when I had that trouble in London with, you know, the person I've mentioned, it would have been very very wise. I mean why I didn't go was sheer obstinacy because I just found that studio, and it was unbearable to leave it right away and I sort of stuck it out, but with hindsight it would have infinitely been better not to have gone through all that stress and to have gone to New York where I did know Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell and I was sort of in with and taken by them to the Chelsea Hotel and all that was going on, and worked there, because I found when I worked in New York, there is an enormous energy in New York, and it's exciting and their standards are quite high.

Did you know them when they came over here? I mean I know Frankenthaler came over here, but...

No, it was when I was there, that when I had the Saidenberg, and then for some, either because of...I don't know how I got in with them but I was on, I remember Robert Motherwell's motorbike he was driving me to places, and then I met Joan Mitchell as well, another woman abstract painter there. And I think when I was there, and Herman Cherry was another person working there, but I sort of somehow was accepted by them and went around. But I didn't really become...I didn't stay along enough. I think I was only there about two weeks, we just went over for the...and so it didn't lead to a closer relationship with them, but had I stayed there I presume, you know, I would have remained connected. And also I find that when I have worked in New York I work really rather well there. I was once allowed to work in the school downtown when it was shut for Easter one year, and...

What, the New York School of Painting?

Mm, is it on 8th Street?

I think so.

Yes. I think, Graham Nickson was the head of it, and he had been a student of the College, and when I went over there he said if I would like to I could work there. And I have worked in an apartment there at times which, I do find there is something very energetic and exciting there. Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 154

Sympathetic atmosphere?

Mm.

More so than London, or...?

Well, it's different, and I was very glad to get back to London because there's something I think very, a terrible sort of jungle feeling about New York, and it's rapacious in a way. And I did appreciate what I felt to be the consideration people show each other in London. Just walking the street there's a sort of difference and a calm that there isn't in New York. But then, it's like getting your batteries charged, you know, it's like, it's so dynamic and tough and exhilarating there that, I rather enjoyed that one time I did it, sort of going there, getting sort of turned on and doing quite good work there and coming back, you know, recharged as it were. So...

I read somewhere that you were quite keen on and perhaps also influenced by African art.

Yes. That was when I, particularly in British Grove, which would have been about '59 wasn't it, that I was there. I know it was when I came back from Cornwall and I took the studio there. And I don't know what made me become interested in it, but I do know that I got some books out of Hammersmith Library of African art, one was by Underwood I think, Leon Underwood, and there was another one with illustrations of African art. And it really interested me, and in fact I've used the books when I was working and they got so covered in paint the library allowed me to, you know, to keep them, because I had wrecked them really.

Didn't they want you to replace them?

No. They were I suppose very nice in a way about that. But they couldn't...they said they couldn't display them any more in the state. So anyway, so... [LAUGHING] But it was, I was searching...that's right, I was searching then for a way out of the texture into form, because really the textural paintings were areas which had some notes in them, but there wasn't a sort of thing was...you know, a completed form was at work in them. And I became fascinated by what I call the...its, you know, asymmetry, is that how you pronounce it?

Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 155 Asymmetry.

Asymmetry. It was totally different from a classical Greek thing, that everything was on a slant, things were pulling one, you know, one shape pulled away from another shape. It seemed to me a whole series of pulls I could see happening in it, and that everything was off balance, so if something was up there on that side it was over there on that side and then something else counteracts it. And that sort of leverage, that strange pulling effect really interested me, and I began to try to make shapes that did that, that from top to bottom there was a balance formed by pulling against, things pulling against each other. And that did influence. I'm not sure when it became apparent in the work but certainly the collages that were done in, well quite a long time afterwards, in '81, were probably based on that. I'm not sure in the Seventies if it, which would have followed wouldn't it, if that...no, if that was '59 it would have been work in the Sixties wouldn't it, that followed that. It's odd because I did lots of, I think works on paper. And in fact the New York collages were based on that, but that was '78.

Perhaps there's a time lapse between...

Perhaps there's a time lapse of getting that idea, whatever. I can't think immediately. I mean if I work through my work in the Polaroids and the catalogues I could find traces of it but... But it did really mean something to me, very important, that way of a shape or form could be built up, and I saw it really in that sort of way, as areas pulling against each other.

Can you define, I mean is it impossible, or can you define what makes a successful painting for you? I suppose it's all those things you've been talking about, but a reconciliation of them or, do you think that a picture has to be resolved in some way?

Well..... [BREAK IN RECORDING] Well for me there's a sort of, if I'm seeing it for the first time I have a shock impact and a sense that it's right, and I feel very extended and I have a great sense of pleasure that, and excitement, if a picture does have that impact on me. And it's to do I think with the placing, the way the proportions of the picture connect and the colour, the balance, and also perhaps, which I'm not quite sure whether it would come first or, is perhaps something very beautiful in a picture. It's very different from the reaction to, for example, a work by Masaccio where it is the very powerful emotional impact of the work, and one of the, a recent work I saw, well not recent, some years I suppose, a few years ago, there was a reproduction in the Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 156 `Independent' of a Madonna and Child by Masaccio, which I think was in a Royal Academy exhibition, it may have been one of the great collections that were shown there, which I found deeply deeply moving, and that's a different experience from the one I'm talking about, but...

Is the other a more intellectual experience then?

Well one I think is just...

A visual.

A visual experience, yes, of proportions, and the others are the emotional content or whatever, what the feeling is, as well as the marvellous way it was drawn. And there's something of the balance that I talked of in the visual pictures let's call them, that is also in that sort of masterpiece, but combined with that there is this very deep insight and emotion that it arouses. And so it does sound as if in a way I'm interested in surface paintings in a way where it's what happens almost... I've often, I have described my work at times as architecture that doesn't have to function, that it's to do with proportion and space and balance, but it doesn't have to actually stand up and not fall down and you know, it doesn't have to have the architectural qualities that keep buildings up, but does have the elements of architecture. And, and in my own work, was it in work in general or in my own work?

Both.

Mm. Well, it's to do with that sense of it being an entity, that it has got the right balance of colour, of the areas, of the shape, everything working together and making a total. And I've sometimes thought that it's biological, that in order to walk we have to balance, we have to, our movements we take them for granted but you know, if we lose our balance we fall over. I think in that way a picture has a kind of biological balance in it. I mean it's also to do with whatever colour means to us and the balance of colour.

What do you think the function of your painting is? I mean is it to provide pleasure?

Well I think it's...it's a way of life and it's a compulsion to do it, and it's something I've always done, but the reason for doing it is, it has a kind of, a rather thrilling excitement to the pictures I haven't yet painted but sometimes think of doing. There's Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 157 something very thrilling about the thought of making them or what they're going to do or be; an experience in them and in working on them, and also of them pulling them off, you know, in getting them to work properly, of what they will look like. And I do think that it is a kind of - it sounds awful but it is really, I think these things about art for healing, whatever, it does enhance being alive, and I think that it's a way of experiencing life and being alive that is shown in a kind of beautiful, strong and balanced effect that makes one better for seeing it in some way.

What about the effect on the viewer, I mean do you wish them to experience beauty, or...?

Well, I think that it's almost taken, it's an unspoken pact that you have with the work, doing the work and both for yourself and for the people who look at it, because through the experience of having painted and paintings being seen, I think that people get from it, the ones who like the ones, I don't know, people like Mr Sewell who gets the reverse from them, but the people who actually like them enjoy them and get the same positive feeling from them as I like to get when I feel I've done, or they work. So it does seem without being written into the contract somehow that what people will get from them is what I intend them to be, which is, it does...I think it really does enhance life, and I think in a way that good architecture, if you live in, amongst good buildings. I've noticed, I once went to a building in Norfolk, I can't think of its name now, but as I walked into the courtyard I absolutely changed my posture and I felt a totally different mood than before I went into it, and I felt I was walking and feeling something that was happening to me by being in that space with those buildings round me. And so, I just feel it is part of what I would call the good in the world. And I think if it wasn't there about it, I... You see I often do wonder and think about my own feelings, whether they are profound enough or whether I'm feeling enough, and I think if one had that taken away then there would be less feeling, there would be less reaction to life. So it's what's called the quality of being alive really.

And do you, I mean, consider it a great responsibility?

No. It just seems to be a natural process that, I think it...I can do it, I at times can...I don't want to sound like I'm like Degas or whatever, but I can at times paint paintings I know that work in a certain way that I want them to, and that other people have received and reacted to in that way. And so, it's really no more of a responsibility than being alive is a responsibility; one does have responsibilities, but you know, as Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Page 158 long as you feel what you are doing is not wrong then it's a kind of, a way of living or a way of experiencing.

And in this sort of way of behaving in life, how important have friends been to you?

Well I couldn't live without them I don't think, I think I would be... I mean having been reading Mrs Gaskell about Bronte who was desperately lonely, on the other hand she did produce a masterpiece from being desperately lonely. So perhaps it has its kind of, you know, good effects. But I would feel very isolated and.....

End of Track 12: Tape 6: Side B Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 13: Tape7: Side A Page 159 Track 13: Tape 7: Side A

.....talking about the importance of friends.

Mm.

And you were saying...

That I want to have friends, yes.

I was going to ask you about one or two that I've met with you, I mean, one being Robin Whitecross.

Yes.

How did you know him?

He was a neighbour in Sydney Close, and he was away for quite a while, he was living in France, and he came back, and he was in rather a devastated state when he returned because someone he had been living with he no longer was and he was very upset by it all. And so I think he was quite glad of my company to start with, because it was someone to talk to and to express his feelings to. But I did find that I liked him very much and that he...he had had an extraordinary life in many ways and he had been a dancer, he was then...he had trained originally as a military tailor in Edinburgh and he could make clothes, and he had then become a ballet costume designer and had made clothes for Fontaine and Nureyev. And he also seemed to be incredibly clever at knowing how to build or how things should be built. And he bought a house in Stockwell, which was really a facade of a house, it had no inside or back, and he sort of built it, and I thought it was a work of art, it was quite wonderful work that he did. And things like, not only the exterior but the inner workings of the house and the plumbing were works of art, how the pipes worked and where they came out, and the logic of it and the appearance of it, and I really was quite enthralled by it, the many things he did. And he was also incredibly kind to me, because he could make me clothes or, he would alter things for me, and we had endless sort of, you know, places I was going to. He once, I was going to a Buckingham Palace garden party once and he made this outfit, which was, you know, enchanting really. In fact when I was, I walked back because there was, the traffic was impossible when I left, so I walked from Buckingham Palace back to Sydney Close in this outfit, and one man came up to Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 13: Tape7: Side A Page 160 me in the street and said, `I must tell you how much I admire what you're wearing'. It was... And he made lots of, he altered things, and made things, and so, and he also would make curtains and things like that. And just talk. And he was very funny, and very good company. And it was a great pleasure to have him as a neighbour, and was always somehow available if one wanted to go round there and, you know, or he wanted to come... And he also helped me with my canvases, you know, he would stretch them. He could use materials and know how to put things together, or make frames or things like that for it, and have ideas about how things should be done, built, or so on. And I think we did both enjoy each other's company very much. And then he...he had...he ran into financial trouble with what he had had to borrow on the Stockwell house, to buy it and repaying it, and so he sold it and came down to Cornwall, because he liked Cornwall in a separate way that I did. His sister lived therand I think he had lived there himself, and he... In fact the man I'm living with knew of the place and told him about the place he has bought there and is now living in, so we see something of him, although he's not as close a neighbour as he used to be.

And what about someone like Anthea Alley?

Well Anthea was a wonderful friend to me. I don't remember how we...obviously we knew the same people and went to the same places, and we were both members of the Chelsea Arts Club, but I can't quite remember how our friendship began. But once it had begun we saw each other, well almost every day, or certainly spoke to each other, and I loved her work, I thought that she had very natural talent and...

When are we talking about, what sort of period?

Well Anthea died two years ago was it?

I don't know.

Yes. And so, I would think from the late Eighties until the sort of early Nineties, something like that. And she had a studio. She lived in a house in Putney where Ronald Alley, from whom she was divorced, lived downstairs, and she had the upper part of the house with a great window overlooking the river. And she worked in a studio in Brixton which was I think possibly an Arts Council... Anyway she rented the studio, which was very cold I thought in the winter. But she sculpted and used very odd materials, and also did some very beautiful paintings I thought which she Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 13: Tape7: Side A Page 161 had up in Putney and also I think some works at Brixton/Stockwell. And she also was sort of an intrepid traveller, and she had I think, when...she had gone on great safari trips and she went to Egypt I think with friends, but she was wonderful. She had this incredibly chaotic car which you climbed over, God knows, to get into or out of. But we went to all sorts of places I would never have got to on my own if I hadn't known Anthea, and we went to various... And she was always eager and ready to go. She got tired very easily so we didn't always go, or get to where we intended to, but... And then she would come to my studio and I always loved seeing her, and she would either talk about my work or what was going on in the art world or what she had seen, and we would... And I always found it very interesting. And she had an extraordinary encyclopaedic knowledge of very odd facts that, God knows how she picked... And she believed in certain things to eat and certain remedies, and I did go with her once to Belgrave Square for the laying on of hands which she found very relaxing and good for her. And I did rather feel the same at that time, but it didn't become, you know, a regular thing with me. I really could talk to her about anything, and she would be very sympathetic, and she was also rather lovely to look at, and so in every way she was enjoyable I felt, and a very close...and I was very very sad when she died, and I always feel, I get angry with the National Health Service because I think if it had been very quickly detected she might have not, you know, they might have saved her.

What was wrong?

She had cancer.

Right. And the other person of course I met with you is Annette Armstrong.

Well I hardly know Annette Armstrong. She is in fact a friend of Robin Whitecross, and I only really know Annette through a visit, an occasional visit with Robin to her or by her to Robin, and so we don't, we aren't really on intimate terms. And my other, as I think I've mentioned, close friend is Jill Neville who has been a long-standing friend.

What sort of person is she?

Well she's a marvellous, she talks, she's...you know, her use of words and ideas are, you know, so entrancing really. And she is very wise in a certain way and funny and very sympathetic and warm, and very hospitable, and has moods that one can Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 13: Tape7: Side A Page 162 recognise and understand. And I've really enjoyed her friendship over the years. I'm not sure how much, or if she talks about my paintings, I feel she's...she has of course a good gut reaction to them but I wouldn't change a painting I don't think because of her opinion, but, and I rather feel that she feels the same about my opinion of writing, because I notice she never shows me...she shows her literary friends her manuscripts. But, I think she's been also a sort of guide in a way through life, in my life in a way, and she... We have decided that we think our lives, we have the same stars or something because we often find coincidences happen where we're both experiencing some sort of situation which each is, in our own lives, you know, each of us is experiencing at the same time in some way.

Is there anyone that you sort of constantly rely on to drag into the studio to say, `What's gone wrong?'

Well Anthea would have been. Well, the only thing about Anthea was, I always felt that she was too kind about the pictures.

Do you need someone who's quite stern?

Well no, I really... I just want to know exactly, what do you think, and I don't mind if you say it's no good because I wouldn't be asking you if I felt it was all right really. If something isn't working, and I'm not...and if it's stuck I want to get on, you know, to know what you can see with a fresh eye that I've stopped seeing in it, you know, something isn't there which should be there, and I know it's not right. But anyway, it's that sort of... And I don't want a kind answer, I want an exact, you know, response. But Anthea said, `Nothing you do is wrong.' Not much! [LAUGHS] So anyway...

But is there anyone else that you can turn to?

Well I have found Willy...

Very good.

Very good, yes. And she has no...you know, she knows what one wants to, she knows what one wants to know, so she will say that. I sometimes used to ask my neighbour, Pat Schleger, who designed Roger's catalogue and designed the Sackler catalogue, what she would think, because she was right next door to me and she was very obliging in that she would come in. But, she always said always the same thing, Sandra Blow C466/42 Track 13: Tape7: Side A Page 163 `Don't touch it.' [LAUGHS] So that... Oh yes, when he was alive, oh yes, both Rodrigo, when Rodrigo was alive I always asked Rodrigo to come and see the Academy pictures before I sent them, and he would come in like the Pope and I would place a chair there for him to sit in, and then he would turn round and then, fortunately mostly he said, `Oh yes, yes, that's all right'. And sometimes Robert when he was alive, Buhler, who was also my neighbour, would perform the same, and so... But what I did enjoy enormously, again very sadly, was Michael Andrews, because I really liked Michael Andrews, I loved his work, and he was so good to talk to and I liked the way he put things. And I really miss him and am really sorry he died. [BREAK IN RECORDING] Yes. Well I think Andrew, what I would like very much is that perhaps in a year or two's time when whatever is going to happen in Cornwall will have happened and whatever'sgoing to happen to my work, which I am hoping to do will have happened, we could then conclude this interview.

I'd like that very much. Thank you.

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End of Interview