Nancy Wynne-Jones: The Welsh-born painter, Nancy Wynne-Jones, who has died aged 83, found in Cork, Wicklow and especially Mayo the inspiration that enabled her to come into her own as a painter after her move to Ireland in the early 1970s. She never rested on her laurels and as she grew older, her work got better.
Her acclaimed 2002 exhibition, I sing thy praise, Mayo, was the result of an association with the county that began in 1994 when she was awarded a Ballinglen fellowship. Going to Mayo was a turning point in her life and work, and she found the feeling of space on Maumkeogh Bog amazing.
"It feels like the beginning of the world, before man was thought of, both awe-inspiring and energising. The marks of old turf-cuttings articulate the bog, the air is filled with light bouncing back from the mountains, contradicting the big receding distance. The mountains are both near and far, the multi-coloured bog both solid and ephemeral." The critic Hilary Pyle wrote of her that she discovered in Mayo, "a country waiting to be imagined in a post-modern world", a discovery that enabled her to discover her true self. Another critic, and her brother-in-law, Brian Fallon, described her as more than a landscapist; in his opinion, she was an individualist who made her own, highly original synthesis of depictions and abstraction. Her own opinion was that she was an abstract expressionist at heart.
Born on December 10th, 1922 at Penmaenucha, Dolgellau, north Wales, she was the youngest of the three children of Charles Llewellyn Wynne-Jones and his wife, Sybil Mary Gella (née Scott). The family had homes in Wales and Dorset.
She was educated at home due to ill health, and she enjoyed drawing and painting from an early age. Ruth Gervis, an illustrator who gave her lessons, taught her the importance of close observation, of "truth to nature", something she never forgot.
The family doctor encouraged her interest in music and in 1938 she began studying the violin and composition; in 1940, she entered the Royal Academy of Music. In 1943, following the deaths of her two brothers on service with the British Army in North Africa, she volunteered to do war work at the Ordnance Survey.
When the war ended, she began working in the book trade. In 1946, she bought the Forum Bookshop in Fulham, which she ran for four years. She enjoyed the work, but the venture was not a financial success. She turned to painting, entering Heatherley's art school in London, and in 1952 enrolled as a non-degree student in Chelsea School of Art.
After three years, she left and continued painting on her own. At the suggestion of Derek Middleton, a painter with whom she had a two-year relationship, in 1957 she travelled to St Ives, Cornwall, to study under Peter Lanyon.
Intending to stay for a fortnight, she remained for 15 years. She began to exhibit her work; with Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton and others in 1959, she exhibited in Washington. Her first one-person exhibition took place in 1962 in London, followed by one in Florence in 1963.
In 1966, she married Conor Fallon, whom she had first met two years earlier when he visited Tony O'Malley in Cornwall. In 1970 they adopted two children, John and Bridget. That year also she held her first one-person exhibition in Ireland at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin.
In 1972 she and her husband moved with their children to live in Scilly House, Kinsale, Co Cork, and she began to exhibit at the Emmet Gallery, Dublin; she later exhibited at the Lincoln Gallery. In 1987 she and her family moved to Rathdrum, Co Wicklow, and from 1990 onwards she was represented by the Taylor Galleries.
During the 1980s and 1990s her work was shown in major group exhibitions. University College Cork in 1992 held a career retrospective, which toured Ireland. She was a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and Aosdána.
Her husband and children survive her.
Nancy Wynne-Jones: born December 10th, 1922; died November 9th, 2006