Mary Potter (painter)

Mary Potter, OBE (9 April 1900 – 14 September 1981) was an English painter whose best-known work uses a restrained palette of subtle colours.

She studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art, beginning in 1918, where she won many prizes including the first prize for portrait painting[1][2] After leaving school, she shared a studio in Fitzroy Street in London's bohemian Fitzrovia neighborhood,[3] became a member briefly of the Seven and Five Society and exhibited with The New English Art Club and The London Group.

By mixing paint with beeswax, she achieved a "chalky luminous quality" using a "pale and subtle" range of colours,[1] and her work grew increasingly abstract.

In a review of that exhibition in The Sunday Times, Marina Vaizey wrote: "The results over the past several decades have been paintings of the most exquisite tensile webs of pale resonant colour, the subjects almost vanished, but the echoes imaginatively suggesting the fullness of life: an evanescent evocation of the shapes and surroundings in which people live.

[10] William Packer the art critic commented on Mary Potter’s art work, for the Financial Times, after one of her shows calling it, “very English, and very good.” He compared her work to that of Victor Pasmore, “Those much-vaunted paintings of his, of the Thames along Chiswick Reach made just after the war, are more than equalled by her comparable and contemporaneous images of the breezy, spray-swept front at Brighton, and her views of Regent's Park and in the Zoo.