Gillian Ayres
| Gillian Ayres | |
|---|---|
Antony and Cleopatra, 1982, Tate Gallery
|
|
| Born |
3 February 1930 Barnes, London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | St Paul's Girls' School |
| Known for |
Painting Printmaking |
| Notable work | Antony and Cleopatra |
| Awards | Blackstone Prize (1988) and Charles Wollaston Award (1989), Royal Academy of Arts |
Gillian Ayres, CBE RA (born 3 February 1930) is a Turner Prize nominated English painter. She is best known for abstract painting and printmaking using vibrant colours.
Ayres was born on 3 February 1930 in Barnes, London, the youngest of three sisters. Ayres started school when she was six. Her parents, a prosperous couple, sent her to Ibstock, a progressive school in Roehampton run on Fröbel principles. In 1941 Ayres was sent to Colet Court, the junior school for St Paul's, in Hammersmith, where on her eleventh birthday she finally learnt to read. She passed the entrance exam for St Paul's Girls' School the following year, and developed an interest in art while there. Among her best schoolfriends was Shirley Williams, with whom she taught art to children in bomb-ravaged parts of London. Ayres then decided to go to art school. In 1946, she applied to the Slade School of Fine Art and was accepted. However, at sixteen, she was too young to enrol. She was advised to apply to the Camberwell School of Art and studied there from 1946 to 1950.
Ayres worked part-time at the AIA Gallery in Soho from 1951 to 1959 before starting a teaching career. Ayres held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s, becoming friends with painters such as Howard Hodgkin, Robyn Denny and Roger Hilton. In 1959, Ayres was asked to teach at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham for six weeks. She remained on the teaching staff until 1965. For much of her time at Corsham she shared a teaching studio with Malcolm Hughes. She was a senior lecturer at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, from 1965 to 1978 and became head of painting at Winchester School of Art in 1978. Ayres left teaching in 1981, and moved to an old rectory on the Llyn Peninsula in north-west Wales to become a full-time painter.
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