Born in London, she suffered scarlet fever as a child, spending weekends and holidays at her grandparents' fruit farm in Kent.

She came from a Jewish family; her father, Jacob (Jack), who was a fruit wholesaler, and her mother, Leah (Lily) nee Rubinstein, had three children, Sandra was the second.

At the age of fourteen, Blow was evacuated with her mother and two brothers to Paddock Wood in Kent, near her grandparents' fruit farm, where she spent her time reading, drawing and painting.

[3] During this time she joined the artists' social scene, meeting people such as Lucian Freud, John Minton and Francis Bacon.

She spent a short period in 1947 at the Royal Academy schools, but found the teaching dull, so instead travelled to Italy to study classic art.

The gallery also represented St Ives artists, including Barbara Hepworth, beginning Blow's life-long connection with the British coastal town.

It was through him that she started to use "poor" non-art materials, as seen in her painting Space And Matter in which she used liquid cement plus chaff and charcoal,[5] but his lasting influence was in his commitment to art and his interest in the different textures of the world.

Blow would regularly use collage effects in her paintings and in her early work, would sometimes dye her canvas with tea to produce natural colours.

This collaboration saw Blow begin to incorporate geometric shapes among her organic forms in her later paintings and turn increasingly to square canvases as an architectural component of her work.

[7] Despite moving to St Ives in the 1990s, Blow continued working in London, participating in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibitions and being honoured with a retrospective in the newly completed Sackler Galleries in 1994.