Yvonne Drewry

Yvonne Drewry (18 February 1918 – 9 August 2007) was an English artist and art teacher, noted for her work in and around Suffolk.

Yvonne Marjorie Drewry was born in Brentford, Middlesex, to Alfred F. Vere Drewry (1888-1980) and his wife Ada, née Anniss (1883-1965). Her father ran a motor parts shop on Deansgate in Manchester. Her uncle James Sidney Drewry was an engineer and co-founder of Shelvoke and Drewry, one of the UK’s largest manufacturers of municipal waste wagons and fire engines.

After studying at Southport College of Art, in 1939 Drewry won an Andrew Grant scholarship of £120 a year for three years to train at the Edinburgh College of Art, where she studied under William George Gillies, John Maxwell and book illustrator Joan Hassall.

Drewry was a prolific artist, working in oil, watercolour, and pen and ink. She was also a notable print-maker and typographer. Her other work included woven textiles and handicrafts. Her work was exhibited regularly in Suffolk galleries, including an annual exhibition at the Denis Taplin Gallery in Woodbridge, Gallery 44 in Aldeburgh, Mall Galleries, Gainsborough's House, Sudbury, Wolsey Art Gallery, Ipswich, and in her own studio, and featured several times in local press articles; she also exhibited internationally and made sales in France and the US, and is licensed through Bridgeman Images. She was highly commended in the 1994 Laing Art Competition.

From 1985 she was part of the 8+1 Suffolk Group, a group of nine artists that could manage and present their own exhibitions. Their first show was at Broughton Gallery, Lanarkshire in August 1985.

Her main subjects were landscapes and seascapes celebrating the Suffolk countryside, along with still life pictures of flowers, plants and trees, including those growing in her own garden; she also produced occasional portraits. Her work was mainly figurative, although her later works were much more abstract in character, using vivid colours and broad brushstrokes. She is mentioned in Patrick Trevor-Roper's influential book The World Through Blunted Sight: An inquiry into the influence of defective vision on art and character (1970) as having different colour perception in each eye. Her works are rarely titled, and whilst the landscapes are clearly recognisable, they are not usually particularly well-known views, although she did paint Snape Maltings and Shingle Street. She generally worked from life, and travelled around Suffolk and Norfolk in a Fiat 238 camper van seeking suitable subjects.

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