Painter. She was one of the foremost British abstract artists and a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts. As a child she showed very early signs of creative ability and by the time she was a senior pupil at St Hilda’s School in Edinburgh she was determined to become an artist and set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art. After some dispute with her father she enrolled in 1931 and, after periods of illness, she graduated with her diploma in 1937. In 1940, still suffering from poor health it was recommended that she went to St Ives in Cornwall as it was thought it would be good for her health and her art. St Ives had become a kind of wartime capital of English modernism, then represented by a very small number of artists including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. She became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and the St Ives Society of Artists but was to leave the latter when, in 1949, the St Ives art community suffered an acrimonious split, and she became a founder member of a breakaway group of abstract artists, the Penwith Society of Arts. She married in 1949 and started to travel extensively. The next ten years saw the full development of her powers as a modern painter. It was, in general terms, in line with that of St Ives School, starting with abstractions based firmly on perception, as in her Glacier paintings of the early 50s. The series of pictures that started in 1949, were inspired by her walks on the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, and reflect the idea of looking at things in a total view, not only from the outside but from all points, including inside. In the 1960s two things happened to disturb her development as a member of the school of St Ives. First she inherited a small estate from her aunt in St Andrews and then she divorced. She lived in Scotland during the winter and Cornwall in the summer. Her work of the later 1960s and 1970s is neither St Ives nor Scottish, but looks to a tradition of modernism more disciplined, abstract and formal than either; and she followed the tradition with rigour and persistence. Later, something of the spirit of Scottish colouristic freedom of expression seemed to creep in with liberating effect, while at the same time she began again to be more interested in her environment, both in Scotland and in Cornwall. From about 1988 to her death there was an outpouring of triumphant and beautiful work employing the full resources, of line, colour, shape and calligraphic brushwork, employed with all the brio and freedom of a vastly experienced painter. In 2001 she was not only awarded the CBE but she at last received the accolade of a major monograph. Written with acuity by Lynne Green it restores her to her central place in the history of modern art in Britain. Her work is too vast to mention it all but some of her well known work includes, in addition to the Glacier Series, Linear Abstract, Two Circles on Purple, Walkabout Time, Celebration at 90, Beach and the White Circle Series.