joanna carrington

Joanna Carrington  1931-2003

Wanted - We are currently looking to purchase work by this artist so do please contact us if you are looking to sell.

It is perhaps a little early to set Joanna Carrington’s place at history’s table but she will certainly have one . The paintings will last and be loved . For her each one was a problem to be solved and experimentation not a risk. She refused to play it safe , never repeating herself, she would paint and repaint a canvas, aiming for the clearest symbolic expression of her subject.

Joanna was born in Hampstead on 6th Novemebr 1931  and her father Noel was a writer and publisher with Country Life before starting Puffin books. Her aunt Dora Carrington, the Bloomsbury painter was Noels sister .

She followed the example of those post-impressionists and modernists who rejected classical perspective and local colour, and searched for new ways to represent the natural world while still retaining the convention of window space.

At 16, she attended the Benton End School under Cedric Morris who wrote to her father in a letter dated 23rd July 1949

Dear Mr Carrington
I have good or bad news for you , whichever way you may look at things . That child of yours is really exceptional a born painter. I have never had a student who showed so much, I might even say as much, promise. She has worked like a horse and her painting is getting better and better - given time she is bound to be a success.

He continued to encourage her throughout her career, sending her telegrams whenever she had an exhibition in London. This was followed by the more intensive tutelage of the Cubist painter Fernand Leger in Paris whose encouragement was apparently only forthcoming when the work resembled his own. Leger's influence can be seen in her use of line and composition.

​On her return to London, she attended the Central School of Art where her tutors included Keith Vaughan, Mervyn Peake and Louis le Brocquy. She was awarded the Queen's Scholarship and was selected for the exhibition, "Six Young Contemporaries" at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in 1952.

​She exhibited throughout her life with her first solo exhibition at the Establishment Gallery in 1962 and subsequent shows at the Crane Kalman, Grosvenor and Thackeray galleries. ​

She lived in France with her second husband, the artist, writer and film-maker, Christoper Mason ultimately settling at St Savin near Poitiers in an old mill which they had lovingly restored. Mason wrote a book about his wife and her life .