Anne Crosby obituary | Portray
My mom, Anne Crosby, who has died aged 92, was a painter and author.
She was born in Elmsted, Kent, to Jean Wylie and her second husband, Rab Buchanan, right into a chaotic family of seven surviving kids. Though her actual first identify was Finella, on the age of six she refused to reply to it ever once more, as an alternative rechristening herself Anne.
Her bohemian communist mother and father divorced when she was younger, and on account of being juggled between them she went to 10 completely different colleges, together with Summerhill in Suffolk and Dartington in Devon.
Finally she made it to Worthing College of Artwork in Sussex after which, in 1949, to Camberwell College of Artwork in south London, the place her mates and contemporaries included Jeffery Camp, Patrick George, David Sylvester, Craigie Aitchison and Euan Uglow.
After ending at Camberwell in 1953, Anne gained a Prix de Rome scholarship that allowed her to color in Paris for 2 years, till she returned to work at her brother Tony’s bookshop in London, and to show artwork for some time at a women’ college. In 1956 she met the architect Theo Crosby at his exhibition This Is Tomorrow. They married in 1960 and had two kids, Matthew and me.
Anne painted day by day, her small canvases taking topics from the Greek myths, enacting huge psychic struggles in an unmistakable blue palette. Though she painted continuously she exhibited little or no, typically remodeling the identical work repeatedly, earlier than finally, in her previous age, destroying a lot of them – in order that few stay.
After the breakup of her marriage within the late Seventies, for the remainder of her life Anne divided her time between London and the Washington house of her American accomplice, Roger Reith, a designer who labored for the US authorities.
Beneficiant, fiercely witty and with a big circle of creative mates, in later life she made recorded contributions to the British Library’s Artist Lives oral historical past mission, sharing her ideas on, and reminiscences of, mates of her mother and father, in addition to of artists she had identified from the Nineteen Fifties onwards.
She is survived by Roger and me. Matthew, who had Down’s syndrome, died aged 25. My mom subsequently wrote a e-book, Matthew: A Memoir, about his life, which was printed in 2006.
