Bettina Shaw-Lawrence

Bettina Shaw-Lawrence
Born	29 July 1921 London, England
Nationality	English
Education	Fernand Léger, Sir Cedric Morris
Known for	Figurative art
Movement	Magic realism, neo-romantic

Bettina Shaw-Lawrence also known as Betty Shaw-Lawrence, is an English 20th century figurative artist born in 1921. Though she studied painting and drawing under Fernand Léger, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, was mainly self-taught. She worked professionally until the early 1980s.

Born on 29 July 1921 in London, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence is a post-World War II artist. Her work is figurative and expresses itself mainly through oil paintings. Her other favourite mediums are black and white or coloured ink drawings. She is also a book illustrator, "widely known as a portrait painter", and a sculptor. Her works are represented in private collections but recently her pen and ink drawing of the poet David Gascoyne has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London. From 1946 onwards, the artist had several solo and group exhibitions in galleries of contemporary Art in London, Rome and New York.

The artist attended, before the outbreak of the Second World War, drawing classes under Fernand Léger and studied sculpture with Ossip Zadkine in Paris. During those formative years David Gascoyne, the Surrealist poet, was her mentor. On her return to London in September, 1939, Shaw-Lawrence met David Kentish and Lucian Freud both students at Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. This encounter enabled her to spend the summer of 1940 studying under the artist Cedric Morris and though she returned to the School at Benton End near Hadleigh, Suffolk, for short spells during the war, Shaw-Lawrence mainly painted in Richmond-upon-Thames .

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Bettina travelled to the Continent. Countries such as Spain or France inspired her works and were subsequently exhibited at The Leicester Galleries and the Hanover Gallery. In 1958 Shaw-Lawrence left England to move to Italy where her oils on canvas became more luminous and serene though her work " might be sets for very sophisticated doll dramas". Her paintings were steeped in "a world of crystalline beauty, alive and real", a world devoid of intruders "because of this power of hers to purify reality and restore it to innocence".

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