Grace Larner (1926–2022)

             Grace Larner was a British painter known for her stylised landscapes and industrial scenes. Born in Beighton near Sheffield, she grew up in Staveley and Whitwell, Derbyshire. As an only child, Larner developed early interests in drama and art that would occupy her for much of her life. She initially attended art school in Chesterfield (1943-45) before moving on to the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1945 to 1948), where she graduated in Painting and Design. Following her time at the Slade she became an art teacher, initially at Rotherham Girls’ High School. She was married to John Larner, a member of the armed forces, in 1950. Life as a military spouse had a strong impact on Larner’s life for the next twenty-five years as she travelled with her husband and set up homes on military bases in Germany, Cyprus and England. Larner set up her studio wherever possible and painted as well as creating set designs for amateur dramatics. She also taught art and exhibited in Germany and England.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Larner was a member of the Industrial Painters Group, a collective that focused on depicting the industrial landscape of Britain. Her work often featured stylised views of quarries, coastal scenes, and rural settings, blending abstraction with figuration. She exhibited widely between 1950 and 1980 at institutions such as the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the United Society of Artists, the Royal Society of British Artists, and the New English Art Club. Larner was known for being a perfectionist and working intensely and earnestly as an artist. Although her semi-nomadic lifestyle presented challenges it also brought her many subjects for inspiration and Cyprus (1957-59) was a particularly favoured location. She moved back to England permanently in 1975, settling in the village of Church Crookham, near Fleet in northeast Hampshire. No-longer able to dedicate herself to painting with the professionalism she demanded of herself, she turned her creative energies to amateur dramatics and creating embroidery for her parish church.

Larner's paintings are characterised by their rich colour palettes and dynamic compositions. Her approach combined a representational foundation with expressive distortions, creating a unique visual language that captured both the form and atmosphere of her subjects. While rooted in real locations and subjects, Larner’s paintings lean into abstraction through compositional choices—flattened perspectives, simplified space, and rhythmic arrangements of shapes and colours. Her simplified and exaggerated forms emphasised curves, geometric shapes, and bold outlines and gave her scenes a graphic, almost illustrative quality. This sense of calculated abstraction was balanced by her textured surfaces. Working primarily in oil on canvas or board, she used visible brushwork and layering to add tactile depth to her paintings, which contributed to their expressive power. This, coupled with her rich colour palettes added emotional resonance to her industrial and rural scenes, softening their harshness and imbuing them with warmth or melancholy.

Her stylised realism with abstract tendencies, particularly evident in her work focusing on the industrial and rural landscapes of mid-twentieth century Britain, managed to communicate the essence of a scene seen through a modern artistic sensibility that reflected broader trends within modern art of the time. Her work echoes aspects of British Neo-Romanticism, sharing affinities with artists like John Piper (1903-92) or Graham Sutherland (1903-80) in her blending of emotional intensity with landscape and her distortions of natural and architectural environments into simplified geometric forms recalls the work of Paul Nash (1889-1946). Larner’s style offered a deeply personal, artistically adventurous response to the landscapes of her time, combining nostalgia, structure, and imaginative reinterpretation.