Wednesday Woman … Sybil Andrews continued

I began writing about Sybil Andrews a few weeks ago and even now she only 30 years old.  Already she has resigned from Grosvenor Art College where she worked as a secretary and moved into a new Studio that was the Hammersmith School of Art.  In June, 1929 Sybil with Claude Flight and the group associated with his methods showed the First Exhibition of British Linocuts at the Redfern Gallery.  In 1933 Sybil Andrews joined with Cyril Powers again to hold their first major exhibition on monotypes.  They also co-operated on a series of posters for the London Passenger Transport Board.  These featured sporting events incorporating the same simplified and rhythmic designs which had been developed in the linocuts.  

It was a very creative time for Sybil, she produced over forty colour blocks during the next 5 years before the World Two broke out.  

The method of expressive simplification that she was eager to achieve was demonstrated in her works.  When asked why her figures didn’t have faces, she explained that ‘If you cannot show emotion in the body then why bother sticking it on the face?’

While living and working in London, Sybil never forgot her links with  Suffolk.  After her mother died she continued to visit her youngest brother who was the curator of Moyse Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds until 1939.  Sybil remembers doing sketches from the his office on the upper floor and it suggested that the Market Place was viewed from there too.  

Following the outbreak of war Sybil went work in a  shipbuilding yard in Southampton Docks taking up her trade as a oxyacetylene welder learned in the first world war. It was here where she met Walter Morgan who she later married in 1943.  

Unhappy in the depressed state of the national post-war economy the couple decided to emigrate to Canada; where they began a new life in a remote logging town on Vancouver Island.  Sybil did not return to printing until 1951 when she had completed the renovation of their house.

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