Purple Crocuses (1991)

Art

Audrey’s Clapham maisonette was crammed with the artefacts of her entire artistic life, too numerous to itemise. Tables, dressers and even the floors were hidden beneath toppling piles of sketches and framed pictures. The beds of the spare room sagged under the burden of hundreds of scrapbooks and her writings.

As an artist, Audrey never stood still. She constantly expanded her oeuvre with innovative and daring exploration founded on the rigorous training she received at Sunderland Art College and the Royal Academy Schools. Although her illness deprived her of a graduate’s diploma from the R.A., her tutors praised her work and she exhibited several times at the famous Summer exhibition. Audrey did not regard herself as an ‘outsider’ artist.

Some early work, two (of 850) sketchbooks and most of her scrapbooks have been scanned by Wellcome and can be viewed online. They may be viewed at Wellcome by appointment. It is possible that more sketchbooks will be viewable online in the future.

Early work

My Mother (1960s)

Audrey was a prolific creator at all stages of her training and throughout her artistic career. The work she did at Bede Grammar School, Sunderland Art College and the Royal Academy Schools is in the realist tradition of her era. She referred to it as her “kitchen sink” period in contrast to the “avant-garde” artist she said she became.

Sketchbooks

Still car (1993)

Audrey constantly produced new artistic work. She left 850 filled sketch books in the house, many with drawings on both sides of a page. She experimented with a variety of media and styles, which seem to have had in common the rapid speed at which she worked in order to capture the immediacy of the subject. The later sketches are all neatly titled, dated and signed. She drew the objects, places and people which surrounded her, at home, on the local streets and all over London. She attended many sporting and cultural events and sketched them, including tennis at Wimbledon; the Queen passing on the Mall; Joan Sutherland at the Royal Opera House; Pierre Boulez at the Albert Hall; Tina Turner at Hammersmith Odeon.

Scrapbooks

The scrapbooks Audrey filled over the years initially displayed her printed photos (100s from a single visit to Regents Park Zoo); news clippings; ads (she went through car dealer and estate agent phases); letters; receipts and found objects (a cigarette butt discovered under a chair in 1999). In her later years, the scrapbooks evolved to include packaging from all the food Audrey had bought and eaten (the receipts recorded separately in the Accounts Books). She arranged the pages meticulously, always with attention to the aesthetic design of the packaging. The collages were annotated with comments such as ‘Intense Colours’ or references to other artworks or similar names they reminded her of. The comments often developed into streams of word-association linking celebrities, artists, politicians, people she knew from the distant past in Sunderland, and ideas and concepts with reminiscent names.