Mary Cozens-Walker (married name Mary Green, 11 August 1938 – 4 July 2020) was an English textile artist and painter best known for her three-dimensional works pertaining to her own domestic life. She exhibited in the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States. She has appeared as a model in about 600 paintings. Her own work is in national collections and paintings of her are also in national collections.

Personal life

Mary Cozens-Walker was born on 11 August 1938 in

Harrow Harrow may refer to: Places * Harrow, Victoria, Australia * Harrow, Ontario, Canada * The Harrow, County Wexford, a village in Ireland * London Borough of Harrow, England ** Harrow, London, a town in London ** Harrow (UK Parliament constituency) ...

, Middlesex. She was educated at North London Collegiate School, London (where she was taught by Peggy Angus) and the

Slade School of Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

(where her contemporaries included

Mario Dubsky Mario Dubsky (1939 – 4 August 1985) was an artist born in London, England, to Viennese Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Life and career Early life Accepted at the Slade School of Fine Art at the unusually young age of 17, Dub ...

Dorothy Mead Dorothy Mead (1928–1975) was a British painter. Biography Mead was born in London, England, and adopted at three months old by a family in Walthamstow. Her mother had a florists shop. She first met David Bomberg when he was teaching at the S ...

and

Dennis Creffield Dennis Creffield (29 January 1931 – 26 June 2018) was a British artist with work owned by major British and worldwide art collections, including the Tate Gallery, The British Museum, Arts Council of England, the Government Art Collection, The L ...

and future RAs Ben Levene,

Patrick Procktor Patrick Procktor (12 March 1936 – 29 August 2003) was a British painter and printmaker. Early life Patrick Procktor was born in Dublin, the younger son of an oil company accountant, but moved to London when his father died in 1940. From the ...

and Anthony Green). Her tutors at the Slade included William Coldstream, Cecil Beaton, Lucian Freud, L.S. Lowry and David Bomberg. In 1961 she married Anthony Green, and they had two daughters, Kate and Lucy. In 1967 she traveled to America when Green received a Harkness Fellowship and spent two years living in

Leonia, New Jersey Leonia is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States census, the borough's population was 8,937,Altadena, California Altadena () ("Alta", Spanish for "Upper", and "dena" from Pasadena) is an unincorporated area and census-designated place in the Verdugo Mountains region of Los Angeles County, California, approximately 14 miles (23 km) from the downtown ...

Professional life

Cozens-Walker's early artistic influences included

Stanley Spencer Sir Stanley Spencer, CBE RA (30 June 1891 – 14 December 1959) was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small ...

Piero della Francesca Piero della Francesca (, also , ; – 12 October 1492), originally named Piero di Benedetto, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca i ...

and the Euston Road School. As she developed her style, fairground art, ship's figureheads and

stumpwork Stumpwork or raised work is a style of embroidery in which the stitched figures are raised from the surface of the work to form a 3-dimensional effect. History The term stumpwork is used to describe a style of raised embroidery which was popu ...

also began to be referenced in her work. In the 1960s and 1970s Cozens-Walker continued to paint, but found it more and more constrictive. She had begun to experiment with stitching in America, and embroidery via individual projects, and this led to her seeking professional advice from the

Royal School of Needlework The Royal School of Needlework (RSN) is a hand embroidery school in the United Kingdom, founded in 1872 and based at Hampton Court Palace since 1987. History The RSN began as the School of Art Needlework in 1872, founded by Lady Victoria Welby ...

. Cozens-Walker returned to education in 1981 to complete a postgraduate Diploma in Embroidery and Textiles at Goldsmiths. Cozens-Walker made her name as an artist combining paint, textiles and papier-mâché, and led to solo exhibitions in the UK, Japan and North America. Cozens-Walker was also the life-long muse to Green, with their relationship portrayed in maybe 600 of his pictures from the 1960s to her death in 2020. They appeared together in programmes such as The South Bank Show with

Melvyn Bragg Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, (born 6 October 1939), is an English broadcaster, author and parliamentarian. He is best known for his work with ITV as editor and presenter of ''The South Bank Show'' (1978–2010), and for the BBC Radio 4 documenta ...

. Some of the paintings of her are in national collections.

Public collections

Setagaya Art Museum The is an art museum in Yōga, Setagaya, Tokyo. The museum, which opened March 30, 1986, houses a permanent gallery and mounts seasonal exhibitions. Structure The main building of the museum, a contemporary design by architect Shōzō Uchii, i ...

, Tokyo *

Arts Council of Great Britain The Arts Council of Great Britain was a non-departmental public body dedicated to the promotion of the fine arts in Great Britain. It was divided in 1994 to form the Arts Council of England (now Arts Council England), the Scottish Arts Council (l ...

, LondonGavin Fry,
Mary Cozens-Walker obituary
, ''The Guardian'', 9 August 2020. *

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts The Sainsbury Centre is an art gallery and museum located on the campus of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. The building, which contains a collection of world art, was one of the first major public buildings to be designed by th ...

, Norwich * 'The Whole Cottage' V&A, London

Exhibitions

* Young Contemporaries: Painting 'Women at their toilet' (reproduced in ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was fo ...

''). * Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1982, 1993, 2008, 1990, 1991. * Ginza Art Space, Tokyo, Japan: Objects of Obsession solo exhibition 1992. * Staempfli Gallery, NYC, US, 1992. * Fishguard Music Festival: Artist in residence 1993. *

Bankfield Museum Bankfield Museum is a grade II listed historic house museum, incorporating a regimental museum and textiles gallery in Boothtown, Halifax, England. It is notable for its past ownership and development by Colonel Edward Akroyd, MP, and its gr ...

: 'From Painted Textures to Stitched Objects' 2001. * Boundary Gallery, London, 2001. *

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

, London, 2004. * Fiberart Gallery, solo exhibition 2004. * Boundary Gallery 'Painting with Thread' exhibition, 2007. * Ruthin Craft Centre 2013.

Books

* ''Objects of Obsession 1955-2011'', Healeys Print Group

External links

Fiberart Gallery Mary Cozens-Walker exhibition

Mary Green IMDB entry

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cozens-Walker, Mary 1938 births 2020 deaths 20th-century English painters 20th-century English women artists Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art Alumni of Goldsmiths, University of London Artists from London English women painters People from Harrow, London People educated at North London Collegiate School British embroiderers