Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres studied at Colet Court and Camberwell College of Arts. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Saint Martin's School of Art. Work by Gillian Ayres is recorded in the collections of Tate, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia and Yale Center for British Art. Distinctions recorded are Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

• Name — Gillian Ayres • Born — 3 February 1930 • Birthplace — Barnes, London, England • Died — 11 April 2018 • Place of death — North Devon, England • Field — * Painting • Printmaking • Education — St Paul's Girls' School; Camberwell School of Art • Works — Antony and Cleopatra (1982)

Gillian Ayres was born to Florence and Stephen Ayres on 3 February 1930 in Barnes, London, the youngest of three sisters. She started school when she was six. Her parents, a prosperous couple who owned a hatmaking factory, 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, Hammersmith. She passed the entrance exam for St Paul's Girls' School the following year, and developed an interest in art while there. Among her schoolfriends was Shirley Williams, with whom she taught art to children in bomb-damaged 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 enroll. She was advised to apply to the Camberwell School of Art and studied there from 1946 to 1950.

• Illustration — Antony and Cleopatra, 1982 Gillian Ayres' early works are typically made with thin vinyl paint in a limited number of colours arranged in relatively simple forms, but later works in oil paint are more exuberant and very colourful, with a thick impasto being used. One of Ayres' early projects was a 1957 commission by architect Michael Greenwood to decorate the South Hampstead High School dining hall in north London. The murals, described as "the only true British contribution to American abstract expressionism", were quickly covered over with wallpaper before being rediscovered in 1983 in nearly perfect condition. The titles of her paintings, such as Anthony and Cleopatra (1982), A Midsummer Night (1990) and Gyre and Gimble (2013), were usually given after the painting is completed and do not directly describe the content of the painting, but rather are intended to resonate with the general mood of the work.

On 24 May 2004, 14 of Ayres' pieces were destroyed in a fire at a warehouse of the art-storage company Momart in the Cromwell industrial estate in Leyton, east London.

Ayres married the painter Henry Mundy in 1951. They divorced in 1976, but continued to live together. They had two sons. The couple lived with their younger son, also a painter. In 1987, Ayres moved from Wales to a 15th-century cottage at Morwenstow, on the Devon–Cornwall border. In the late 1970s, Ayres suffered from pancreatitis and was comatose for four days. In 2003, she suffered a heart attack.

Ayres died in hospital in North Devon on 11 April 2018, aged 88. Upon her death, she was described as "immensely courageous, independent and determined in both her art and her lifestyle" by the Alan Cristea Gallery, who represented her for twenty years. Her work was shown posthumously, alongside that of Rachel Jones and Nao Matsunaga in 2019 at the New Art Centre, Salisbury, Wiltshire.