ANGELA CONNER PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY

ANGELA CONNER

British, born 1935

BIOGRAPHY
Angela Conner was born in London in 1935 and was initially a self-taught artist, but “developed her professional foundation working in Dame Barbara Hepworth’s celebrated Cornwall studio.” Conner was married to the documentary film-maker and photographer John Bulmer. Her sister was the writer and critic Penelope Gilliatt, third wife of the playwright John Osborne. Conner’s portrait subjects include Sir John Betjeman, Sir Noël Coward, Lucian Freud, Charles de Gaulle, Lord Goodman, Harold Macmillan, HM The Queen, Sir John Tavener, Lord Rothschild, Lord Sainsbury, The Duke of Devonshire, and HRH The Prince of Wales.

Conner claims that she is “basically a landscape sculptor using natural forces such as wind, water, gravity, sun and shadow.” These sculptures include the 20-tonne Irish Wave, 129 feet high, of stainless steel and carbon fiber. At the time of its construction it was believed to be the world's highest mobile, and is located in Park West business park, Dublin, Ireland. Solo exhibitions of Conner's work have been held at Hirschl Fine Art, Browse & Darby, Gimpel Fils Gallery, Hatfield House, Pittsburgh Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Conner has won numerous competitions and awards including the Pratt Legends Award, and is a fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors.

In the 1970s, when she was in her 40s, Angela Conner painted a series of oil studies of the view out over the East River in New York from the windows of unoccupied offices in the United Nations building on Manhattan where her stepfather worked, not far from where Georgia O’Keeffe had painted similar views from the Shelton Hotel fifty years before. Conner painted in the first light of the morning, before the UN staff arrived for the day, to catch the subtle hues of sunrise over the expansive view to the East. These paintings are like tone poems, and are often in a ‘letterbox' format, the better to catch the breadth of the sunrise. Many have the time they were painted written on the back, all between 5:45 and 8:00 am. She seems to have painted them quite quickly (half an hour apart at the most). In them you can see the Queensborough Bridge, or the tip of Roosevelt Island with its little reef, or the tiny lump of U Thant (formerly Belmont) Island, and you can see past the old docks on the Queens shoreline, (now part of Gantry Plaza State Park), past the giant gantries and Long Island Power Station with its distinctive four smoke stacks, now gone, over Hunter’s Point, to Jackson Heights and on down the length of Long Island. Boats push up and down the river, leaving rippled wakes in the water. Several of her paintings like this were bought by the then Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and are hanging at Chatsworth.

Museum & Public Collections
American Museum & Gardens, Bath
Ascot Racecourse, Ascot
Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London
Broughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Carlton Gardens, London
Chatsworth House, Bakewell, Derbyshire
Cheltenham Racecourse, Cheltenham
Economist Plaza, London
Epsom Race Course, Epsom
Eton College, Eton
Fleming Collection, London
Future Walk, Chesterfield, Derbyshire
Goodenough College, London
Heinz Plaza, Pittsburgh, PA
House of Commons, London
Jewish Museum, New York
London Library, London
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Musée de l’Armée, Paris
National Horseracing Museum, Newmarket
National Portrait Gallery, London
National Trust Collection
Park West Plaza, Dublin
Queen’s Walk, Lambeth
Royal Chapel, Windsor
Royal Festival Hall, London
Shakespeare Museum, Stratford-upon-Avon
St. George’s Chapel, Windsor
St. John’s College, University of Cambridge
Theater Hall of Fame, Gershwin Theatre, New York
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London
University College, University of Oxford
University of York, York
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT