While visiting the Christchurch gallery in New Zealand earlier this year, I came across a wonderful exhibition of the work of Eileen Mayo (1909 – 1994). She worked in almost every medium avai…
Woman and Siamese cat, 1952 Eileen Mayo was a versatile English painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, designer and calligrapher. I recently discovered her, and was fascinated by her talent, versatility and interestingly adventurous life. Mayo worked with many different media, and her artworks and books were often centered on animals. She was born in Norwich in 1906, and educated in Yorkshire and Bristol. After her father's death in 1921, her mother and two sisters emigrated to New Zealand, while she moved to London to study art at various schools, and was taught the art of linocutting by Claude Flight. Cats in the Trees, 1931 Mayo was penniless but very beautiful, and after struggling with extreme poverty she became a celebrated model for some of the most important artists of the day, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod Procter, Bernard Meninsky, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Here's a link to an interesting 1928 magazine article titled "Saved form Suicide; Snatched from an Existence Worse Than Death - Starving, Friendless, Discouraged, Eileen Mayo Tells How She Battled With Despair and Suddenly Found Herself Surrounded With Prosperity and Fame, Her Portrait the Center of Attraction in the Royal Academy Exhibition in London." The Children's Circus Book, 1934 From 1928 to 1938 Mayo took part in the British Linocuts exhibitions. As her reputation as a printmaker and illustrator increased, she found work as a freelance designer, and later held teaching positions at St. Martin's School of Art and Sir John Cass College in London. In this period she also started illustrating and writing children's books. Sheffy the squirrel, c.1941 Best Cat Stories, 1942 One Day on Beetle Rock, 1946 In 1936 Mayo married Dr Richard Gainsborough, and during World War II she helped him run his practice in Sussex while creating nearly 1,000 illustrations for her book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution. After retiring from medicine her husband founded the magazine Art News and Review, and she designed its first issue in 1949. Spread from The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution, c.1949 (click to view larger!) The Nature Lover's Companion, 1950 Mayo's books on animals and nature also include Larger Animals of the Countryside, Shells and How They Live, and Nature's ABC. After separating from her husband, in 1952 Mayo emigrated to Australia. Besides teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, she designed murals and tapestries, illustrated books, and wrote for Australian and English periodicals. She also created many beautiful stamp and poster designs depicting the unique flora and fauna of Australia. The Australian Commonwealth series of six postage stamps issued between 1959 and 1962 and featuring platypus, kangaroo, banded anteater, tiger cat, rabbit bandicoot and Tasmanian tiger, was awarded the Vizard-Wholohan Prize for prints in 1962. It was one of the earliest representations of Australian flora and fauna on stamps, and the first series to be designed by a woman. Black Swans, colored linocut In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand to be close to her family, and in 1965 she settled in Christchurch, where she continued to live until her death in 1994. She taught at the University of Canterbury until 1972, and worked for more than three years on an underwater diorama with Otago Museum. After being a founding member of Sydney Printmakers, she was on the Print Council of New Zealand, but it was only when she retired that she was able to buy a printing press and make prints full-time. After she started suffering from severe arthritis, Mayo turned to the easier medium of silkscreen prints, but in 1985 she was forced to stop. Days before her death, she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Humpback and Bottleneck screenprint, 1980 Many thanks to The Visual Telling of Stories for uploading its precious scans!
While visiting the Christchurch gallery in New Zealand earlier this year, I came across a wonderful exhibition of the work of Eileen Mayo (1909 – 1994). She worked in almost every medium avai…
Woman and Siamese cat, 1952 Eileen Mayo was a versatile English painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, designer and calligrapher. I recently discovered her, and was fascinated by her talent, versatility and interestingly adventurous life. Mayo worked with many different media, and her artworks and books were often centered on animals. She was born in Norwich in 1906, and educated in Yorkshire and Bristol. After her father's death in 1921, her mother and two sisters emigrated to New Zealand, while she moved to London to study art at various schools, and was taught the art of linocutting by Claude Flight. Cats in the Trees, 1931 Mayo was penniless but very beautiful, and after struggling with extreme poverty she became a celebrated model for some of the most important artists of the day, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod Procter, Bernard Meninsky, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Here's a link to an interesting 1928 magazine article titled "Saved form Suicide; Snatched from an Existence Worse Than Death - Starving, Friendless, Discouraged, Eileen Mayo Tells How She Battled With Despair and Suddenly Found Herself Surrounded With Prosperity and Fame, Her Portrait the Center of Attraction in the Royal Academy Exhibition in London." The Children's Circus Book, 1934 From 1928 to 1938 Mayo took part in the British Linocuts exhibitions. As her reputation as a printmaker and illustrator increased, she found work as a freelance designer, and later held teaching positions at St. Martin's School of Art and Sir John Cass College in London. In this period she also started illustrating and writing children's books. Sheffy the squirrel, c.1941 Best Cat Stories, 1942 One Day on Beetle Rock, 1946 In 1936 Mayo married Dr Richard Gainsborough, and during World War II she helped him run his practice in Sussex while creating nearly 1,000 illustrations for her book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution. After retiring from medicine her husband founded the magazine Art News and Review, and she designed its first issue in 1949. Spread from The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution, c.1949 (click to view larger!) The Nature Lover's Companion, 1950 Mayo's books on animals and nature also include Larger Animals of the Countryside, Shells and How They Live, and Nature's ABC. After separating from her husband, in 1952 Mayo emigrated to Australia. Besides teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, she designed murals and tapestries, illustrated books, and wrote for Australian and English periodicals. She also created many beautiful stamp and poster designs depicting the unique flora and fauna of Australia. The Australian Commonwealth series of six postage stamps issued between 1959 and 1962 and featuring platypus, kangaroo, banded anteater, tiger cat, rabbit bandicoot and Tasmanian tiger, was awarded the Vizard-Wholohan Prize for prints in 1962. It was one of the earliest representations of Australian flora and fauna on stamps, and the first series to be designed by a woman. Black Swans, colored linocut In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand to be close to her family, and in 1965 she settled in Christchurch, where she continued to live until her death in 1994. She taught at the University of Canterbury until 1972, and worked for more than three years on an underwater diorama with Otago Museum. After being a founding member of Sydney Printmakers, she was on the Print Council of New Zealand, but it was only when she retired that she was able to buy a printing press and make prints full-time. After she started suffering from severe arthritis, Mayo turned to the easier medium of silkscreen prints, but in 1985 she was forced to stop. Days before her death, she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Humpback and Bottleneck screenprint, 1980 Many thanks to The Visual Telling of Stories for uploading its precious scans!
To read what some curators and auction houses say about Eileen Mayo (1906 - 1994) in the Antipodes, you would think she was some kind of multinational. But all the linocuts here (except for the last one) date from the time she spent in Britain before she left in 1953. Isabel de B Lockyer dated all of hers and most of these are dateable, too. To me, this suggests something interesting about the attitude of these artists to their linocuts - that it is art and not craft. Following on from Claude Flight, they make claims for a medium often seen as suitable for children. (Franz Cizek (1865 - 1946) at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna had pioneered its use for children and in 1925 Alan Seaby had this to say about his work 'it has been found that a child... can deal with linoleum with ease'). And, of course, Turkish Bath (1927ish) wilfully contradicts all this professorial wisdom. Its steamy abandon is hardly general viewing. Morning tea, with its sexual ambiguity, is even less so. Here is an artist who had trained with a modern vengeance at a series of London art schools: the Slade, the Central School, Chelsea Polytechnic. But it all went out the window with her very first print. She famously got on the phone to Claude Flight for instruction in linocut. The sumptuous art deco of Turkish Bath was the lurid result. It's outrageous, of course, and a lark. And it also got her included in the 'The first exhibition of British Linocut' that Flight organised in 1929. (I am going by Osborne Samuel's date for this - it seems to waver). She was a true printmaker at that point; an artist who was using print to try out new ideas. By Morning tea her lifelong use of bold colour and repetitive, sinuous line is already well to the fore. She was an admirer of Eric Gill's work but in those first two prints she come across as far more fresh and contemporary than Gill ever did (and I admire his work, too). If Black Swan sees her moving towards an interest in natural history, Cats in the trees displays the same wit and decorative elan we saw in her figure subjects. The skill of her work is beyond doubt. She was highly trained. The growing formalism of her work during the thirties is fairly typical of the times, which were less than easy. She perhaps wasn't going to make a living out of jazz-age linocuts but personally I would have liked to see more. These two next prints, with their flat figures, simplified colours and sense of recording popular life, would not be out of place in a King Penguin book about British folk art. The Doric Dairy cart is quite some way from the sensuousness of the turkish baths, or waking up. There we had what I find very attractive, a woman artist taking women as her subject - not women in a domestic setting but in pleasurable ones. With ice-cream vendors and milk carts, we move back to a simplified world of linocut childhood. They certainly look like illustrations rather than manifestos. But this is not a linocut artist, not like, say, Sybil Andrews or Claude Flight. All I have done is look at one aspect of Mayo's work that I like and that starts off very early in her career. She made wood-engravings, lithographs, screen prints, too, sometimes of the same image but never with quite the same sense of verve that she achieved early on. But everything still went into the mix. This later linocut, which she made in Australia, has elements of both surrealism and abstraction. It's a glorious thing but you can see the teacher in her. In that resepect she is like Bormann and Klemm and Orlik, exemplary in what she does but somehow there is still something missing. I think you can tell by now which of these works I prefer.
A rare and previously unseen tapestry found by chance has been transformed into a new large-scale textile work.To coincide with the first ever UK solo exhibition of multi-skilled painter, printmaker, illustrator, and tapestry designer, Eileen Mayo DBE (1906-1994) a tapestry cartoon by the artist which was found by chan
While visiting the Christchurch gallery in New Zealand earlier this year, I came across a wonderful exhibition of the work of Eileen Mayo (1909 – 1994). She worked in almost every medium avai…
While visiting the Christchurch gallery in New Zealand earlier this year, I came across a wonderful exhibition of the work of Eileen Mayo (1909 – 1994). She worked in almost every medium avai…
“You now have learned enough to see / That Cats are much like you and me / And other people whom we find / Possessed of various types of mind.” A gem from the lost 1953 treasure Best Ca…
Eileen Mayo. 'Prowling Cat'. Woodcut print of a black cat. British, 1938.
Woman and Siamese cat, 1952 Eileen Mayo was a versatile English painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, designer and calligrapher. I recently discovered her, and was fascinated by her talent, versatility and interestingly adventurous life. Mayo worked with many different media, and her artworks and books were often centered on animals. She was born in Norwich in 1906, and educated in Yorkshire and Bristol. After her father's death in 1921, her mother and two sisters emigrated to New Zealand, while she moved to London to study art at various schools, and was taught the art of linocutting by Claude Flight. Cats in the Trees, 1931 Mayo was penniless but very beautiful, and after struggling with extreme poverty she became a celebrated model for some of the most important artists of the day, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod Procter, Bernard Meninsky, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Here's a link to an interesting 1928 magazine article titled "Saved form Suicide; Snatched from an Existence Worse Than Death - Starving, Friendless, Discouraged, Eileen Mayo Tells How She Battled With Despair and Suddenly Found Herself Surrounded With Prosperity and Fame, Her Portrait the Center of Attraction in the Royal Academy Exhibition in London." The Children's Circus Book, 1934 From 1928 to 1938 Mayo took part in the British Linocuts exhibitions. As her reputation as a printmaker and illustrator increased, she found work as a freelance designer, and later held teaching positions at St. Martin's School of Art and Sir John Cass College in London. In this period she also started illustrating and writing children's books. Sheffy the squirrel, c.1941 Best Cat Stories, 1942 One Day on Beetle Rock, 1946 In 1936 Mayo married Dr Richard Gainsborough, and during World War II she helped him run his practice in Sussex while creating nearly 1,000 illustrations for her book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution. After retiring from medicine her husband founded the magazine Art News and Review, and she designed its first issue in 1949. Spread from The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution, c.1949 (click to view larger!) The Nature Lover's Companion, 1950 Mayo's books on animals and nature also include Larger Animals of the Countryside, Shells and How They Live, and Nature's ABC. After separating from her husband, in 1952 Mayo emigrated to Australia. Besides teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, she designed murals and tapestries, illustrated books, and wrote for Australian and English periodicals. She also created many beautiful stamp and poster designs depicting the unique flora and fauna of Australia. The Australian Commonwealth series of six postage stamps issued between 1959 and 1962 and featuring platypus, kangaroo, banded anteater, tiger cat, rabbit bandicoot and Tasmanian tiger, was awarded the Vizard-Wholohan Prize for prints in 1962. It was one of the earliest representations of Australian flora and fauna on stamps, and the first series to be designed by a woman. Black Swans, colored linocut In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand to be close to her family, and in 1965 she settled in Christchurch, where she continued to live until her death in 1994. She taught at the University of Canterbury until 1972, and worked for more than three years on an underwater diorama with Otago Museum. After being a founding member of Sydney Printmakers, she was on the Print Council of New Zealand, but it was only when she retired that she was able to buy a printing press and make prints full-time. After she started suffering from severe arthritis, Mayo turned to the easier medium of silkscreen prints, but in 1985 she was forced to stop. Days before her death, she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Humpback and Bottleneck screenprint, 1980 Many thanks to The Visual Telling of Stories for uploading its precious scans!
To read what some curators and auction houses say about Eileen Mayo (1906 - 1994) in the Antipodes, you would think she was some kind of multinational. But all the linocuts here (except for the last one) date from the time she spent in Britain before she left in 1953. Isabel de B Lockyer dated all of hers and most of these are dateable, too. To me, this suggests something interesting about the attitude of these artists to their linocuts - that it is art and not craft. Following on from Claude Flight, they make claims for a medium often seen as suitable for children. (Franz Cizek (1865 - 1946) at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna had pioneered its use for children and in 1925 Alan Seaby had this to say about his work 'it has been found that a child... can deal with linoleum with ease'). And, of course, Turkish Bath (1927ish) wilfully contradicts all this professorial wisdom. Its steamy abandon is hardly general viewing. Morning tea, with its sexual ambiguity, is even less so. Here is an artist who had trained with a modern vengeance at a series of London art schools: the Slade, the Central School, Chelsea Polytechnic. But it all went out the window with her very first print. She famously got on the phone to Claude Flight for instruction in linocut. The sumptuous art deco of Turkish Bath was the lurid result. It's outrageous, of course, and a lark. And it also got her included in the 'The first exhibition of British Linocut' that Flight organised in 1929. (I am going by Osborne Samuel's date for this - it seems to waver). She was a true printmaker at that point; an artist who was using print to try out new ideas. By Morning tea her lifelong use of bold colour and repetitive, sinuous line is already well to the fore. She was an admirer of Eric Gill's work but in those first two prints she come across as far more fresh and contemporary than Gill ever did (and I admire his work, too). If Black Swan sees her moving towards an interest in natural history, Cats in the trees displays the same wit and decorative elan we saw in her figure subjects. The skill of her work is beyond doubt. She was highly trained. The growing formalism of her work during the thirties is fairly typical of the times, which were less than easy. She perhaps wasn't going to make a living out of jazz-age linocuts but personally I would have liked to see more. These two next prints, with their flat figures, simplified colours and sense of recording popular life, would not be out of place in a King Penguin book about British folk art. The Doric Dairy cart is quite some way from the sensuousness of the turkish baths, or waking up. There we had what I find very attractive, a woman artist taking women as her subject - not women in a domestic setting but in pleasurable ones. With ice-cream vendors and milk carts, we move back to a simplified world of linocut childhood. They certainly look like illustrations rather than manifestos. But this is not a linocut artist, not like, say, Sybil Andrews or Claude Flight. All I have done is look at one aspect of Mayo's work that I like and that starts off very early in her career. She made wood-engravings, lithographs, screen prints, too, sometimes of the same image but never with quite the same sense of verve that she achieved early on. But everything still went into the mix. This later linocut, which she made in Australia, has elements of both surrealism and abstraction. It's a glorious thing but you can see the teacher in her. In that resepect she is like Bormann and Klemm and Orlik, exemplary in what she does but somehow there is still something missing. I think you can tell by now which of these works I prefer.
Woman and Siamese cat, 1952 Eileen Mayo was a versatile English painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, designer and calligrapher. I recently discovered her, and was fascinated by her talent, versatility and interestingly adventurous life. Mayo worked with many different media, and her artworks and books were often centered on animals. She was born in Norwich in 1906, and educated in Yorkshire and Bristol. After her father's death in 1921, her mother and two sisters emigrated to New Zealand, while she moved to London to study art at various schools, and was taught the art of linocutting by Claude Flight. Cats in the Trees, 1931 Mayo was penniless but very beautiful, and after struggling with extreme poverty she became a celebrated model for some of the most important artists of the day, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod Procter, Bernard Meninsky, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Here's a link to an interesting 1928 magazine article titled "Saved form Suicide; Snatched from an Existence Worse Than Death - Starving, Friendless, Discouraged, Eileen Mayo Tells How She Battled With Despair and Suddenly Found Herself Surrounded With Prosperity and Fame, Her Portrait the Center of Attraction in the Royal Academy Exhibition in London." The Children's Circus Book, 1934 From 1928 to 1938 Mayo took part in the British Linocuts exhibitions. As her reputation as a printmaker and illustrator increased, she found work as a freelance designer, and later held teaching positions at St. Martin's School of Art and Sir John Cass College in London. In this period she also started illustrating and writing children's books. Sheffy the squirrel, c.1941 Best Cat Stories, 1942 One Day on Beetle Rock, 1946 In 1936 Mayo married Dr Richard Gainsborough, and during World War II she helped him run his practice in Sussex while creating nearly 1,000 illustrations for her book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution. After retiring from medicine her husband founded the magazine Art News and Review, and she designed its first issue in 1949. Spread from The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution, c.1949 (click to view larger!) The Nature Lover's Companion, 1950 Mayo's books on animals and nature also include Larger Animals of the Countryside, Shells and How They Live, and Nature's ABC. After separating from her husband, in 1952 Mayo emigrated to Australia. Besides teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, she designed murals and tapestries, illustrated books, and wrote for Australian and English periodicals. She also created many beautiful stamp and poster designs depicting the unique flora and fauna of Australia. The Australian Commonwealth series of six postage stamps issued between 1959 and 1962 and featuring platypus, kangaroo, banded anteater, tiger cat, rabbit bandicoot and Tasmanian tiger, was awarded the Vizard-Wholohan Prize for prints in 1962. It was one of the earliest representations of Australian flora and fauna on stamps, and the first series to be designed by a woman. Black Swans, colored linocut In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand to be close to her family, and in 1965 she settled in Christchurch, where she continued to live until her death in 1994. She taught at the University of Canterbury until 1972, and worked for more than three years on an underwater diorama with Otago Museum. After being a founding member of Sydney Printmakers, she was on the Print Council of New Zealand, but it was only when she retired that she was able to buy a printing press and make prints full-time. After she started suffering from severe arthritis, Mayo turned to the easier medium of silkscreen prints, but in 1985 she was forced to stop. Days before her death, she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Humpback and Bottleneck screenprint, 1980 Many thanks to The Visual Telling of Stories for uploading its precious scans!
Eileen Mayo’s illustrative talents were admired across both hemispheres, writes Robyn Notman. Admirers of the kereru, will be delighted by this...
To read what some curators and auction houses say about Eileen Mayo (1906 - 1994) in the Antipodes, you would think she was some kind of multinational. But all the linocuts here (except for the last one) date from the time she spent in Britain before she left in 1953. Isabel de B Lockyer dated all of hers and most of these are dateable, too. To me, this suggests something interesting about the attitude of these artists to their linocuts - that it is art and not craft. Following on from Claude Flight, they make claims for a medium often seen as suitable for children. (Franz Cizek (1865 - 1946) at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna had pioneered its use for children and in 1925 Alan Seaby had this to say about his work 'it has been found that a child... can deal with linoleum with ease'). And, of course, Turkish Bath (1927ish) wilfully contradicts all this professorial wisdom. Its steamy abandon is hardly general viewing. Morning tea, with its sexual ambiguity, is even less so. Here is an artist who had trained with a modern vengeance at a series of London art schools: the Slade, the Central School, Chelsea Polytechnic. But it all went out the window with her very first print. She famously got on the phone to Claude Flight for instruction in linocut. The sumptuous art deco of Turkish Bath was the lurid result. It's outrageous, of course, and a lark. And it also got her included in the 'The first exhibition of British Linocut' that Flight organised in 1929. (I am going by Osborne Samuel's date for this - it seems to waver). She was a true printmaker at that point; an artist who was using print to try out new ideas. By Morning tea her lifelong use of bold colour and repetitive, sinuous line is already well to the fore. She was an admirer of Eric Gill's work but in those first two prints she come across as far more fresh and contemporary than Gill ever did (and I admire his work, too). If Black Swan sees her moving towards an interest in natural history, Cats in the trees displays the same wit and decorative elan we saw in her figure subjects. The skill of her work is beyond doubt. She was highly trained. The growing formalism of her work during the thirties is fairly typical of the times, which were less than easy. She perhaps wasn't going to make a living out of jazz-age linocuts but personally I would have liked to see more. These two next prints, with their flat figures, simplified colours and sense of recording popular life, would not be out of place in a King Penguin book about British folk art. The Doric Dairy cart is quite some way from the sensuousness of the turkish baths, or waking up. There we had what I find very attractive, a woman artist taking women as her subject - not women in a domestic setting but in pleasurable ones. With ice-cream vendors and milk carts, we move back to a simplified world of linocut childhood. They certainly look like illustrations rather than manifestos. But this is not a linocut artist, not like, say, Sybil Andrews or Claude Flight. All I have done is look at one aspect of Mayo's work that I like and that starts off very early in her career. She made wood-engravings, lithographs, screen prints, too, sometimes of the same image but never with quite the same sense of verve that she achieved early on. But everything still went into the mix. This later linocut, which she made in Australia, has elements of both surrealism and abstraction. It's a glorious thing but you can see the teacher in her. In that resepect she is like Bormann and Klemm and Orlik, exemplary in what she does but somehow there is still something missing. I think you can tell by now which of these works I prefer.
While visiting the Christchurch gallery in New Zealand earlier this year, I came across a wonderful exhibition of the work of Eileen Mayo (1909 – 1994). She worked in almost every medium avai…
Woman and Siamese cat, 1952 Eileen Mayo was a versatile English painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, designer and calligrapher. I recently discovered her, and was fascinated by her talent, versatility and interestingly adventurous life. Mayo worked with many different media, and her artworks and books were often centered on animals. She was born in Norwich in 1906, and educated in Yorkshire and Bristol. After her father's death in 1921, her mother and two sisters emigrated to New Zealand, while she moved to London to study art at various schools, and was taught the art of linocutting by Claude Flight. Cats in the Trees, 1931 Mayo was penniless but very beautiful, and after struggling with extreme poverty she became a celebrated model for some of the most important artists of the day, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod Procter, Bernard Meninsky, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Here's a link to an interesting 1928 magazine article titled "Saved form Suicide; Snatched from an Existence Worse Than Death - Starving, Friendless, Discouraged, Eileen Mayo Tells How She Battled With Despair and Suddenly Found Herself Surrounded With Prosperity and Fame, Her Portrait the Center of Attraction in the Royal Academy Exhibition in London." The Children's Circus Book, 1934 From 1928 to 1938 Mayo took part in the British Linocuts exhibitions. As her reputation as a printmaker and illustrator increased, she found work as a freelance designer, and later held teaching positions at St. Martin's School of Art and Sir John Cass College in London. In this period she also started illustrating and writing children's books. Sheffy the squirrel, c.1941 Best Cat Stories, 1942 One Day on Beetle Rock, 1946 In 1936 Mayo married Dr Richard Gainsborough, and during World War II she helped him run his practice in Sussex while creating nearly 1,000 illustrations for her book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution. After retiring from medicine her husband founded the magazine Art News and Review, and she designed its first issue in 1949. Spread from The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution, c.1949 (click to view larger!) The Nature Lover's Companion, 1950 Mayo's books on animals and nature also include Larger Animals of the Countryside, Shells and How They Live, and Nature's ABC. After separating from her husband, in 1952 Mayo emigrated to Australia. Besides teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, she designed murals and tapestries, illustrated books, and wrote for Australian and English periodicals. She also created many beautiful stamp and poster designs depicting the unique flora and fauna of Australia. The Australian Commonwealth series of six postage stamps issued between 1959 and 1962 and featuring platypus, kangaroo, banded anteater, tiger cat, rabbit bandicoot and Tasmanian tiger, was awarded the Vizard-Wholohan Prize for prints in 1962. It was one of the earliest representations of Australian flora and fauna on stamps, and the first series to be designed by a woman. Black Swans, colored linocut In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand to be close to her family, and in 1965 she settled in Christchurch, where she continued to live until her death in 1994. She taught at the University of Canterbury until 1972, and worked for more than three years on an underwater diorama with Otago Museum. After being a founding member of Sydney Printmakers, she was on the Print Council of New Zealand, but it was only when she retired that she was able to buy a printing press and make prints full-time. After she started suffering from severe arthritis, Mayo turned to the easier medium of silkscreen prints, but in 1985 she was forced to stop. Days before her death, she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Humpback and Bottleneck screenprint, 1980 Many thanks to The Visual Telling of Stories for uploading its precious scans!
Eileen Mayo. 'The Toilet'. Woodcut print of a black cat washing its shoulder. British, 1942.
Eileen Mayo - Alphabet Two
A rare and previously unseen tapestry found by chance has been transformed into a new large-scale textile work.To coincide with the first ever UK solo exhibition of multi-skilled painter, printmaker, illustrator, and tapestry designer, Eileen Mayo DBE (1906-1994) a tapestry cartoon by the artist which was found by chan
Woman and Siamese cat, 1952 Eileen Mayo was a versatile English painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, designer and calligrapher. I recently discovered her, and was fascinated by her talent, versatility and interestingly adventurous life. Mayo worked with many different media, and her artworks and books were often centered on animals. She was born in Norwich in 1906, and educated in Yorkshire and Bristol. After her father's death in 1921, her mother and two sisters emigrated to New Zealand, while she moved to London to study art at various schools, and was taught the art of linocutting by Claude Flight. Cats in the Trees, 1931 Mayo was penniless but very beautiful, and after struggling with extreme poverty she became a celebrated model for some of the most important artists of the day, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod Procter, Bernard Meninsky, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Here's a link to an interesting 1928 magazine article titled "Saved form Suicide; Snatched from an Existence Worse Than Death - Starving, Friendless, Discouraged, Eileen Mayo Tells How She Battled With Despair and Suddenly Found Herself Surrounded With Prosperity and Fame, Her Portrait the Center of Attraction in the Royal Academy Exhibition in London." The Children's Circus Book, 1934 From 1928 to 1938 Mayo took part in the British Linocuts exhibitions. As her reputation as a printmaker and illustrator increased, she found work as a freelance designer, and later held teaching positions at St. Martin's School of Art and Sir John Cass College in London. In this period she also started illustrating and writing children's books. Sheffy the squirrel, c.1941 Best Cat Stories, 1942 One Day on Beetle Rock, 1946 In 1936 Mayo married Dr Richard Gainsborough, and during World War II she helped him run his practice in Sussex while creating nearly 1,000 illustrations for her book The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution. After retiring from medicine her husband founded the magazine Art News and Review, and she designed its first issue in 1949. Spread from The Story of Living Things and Their Evolution, c.1949 (click to view larger!) The Nature Lover's Companion, 1950 Mayo's books on animals and nature also include Larger Animals of the Countryside, Shells and How They Live, and Nature's ABC. After separating from her husband, in 1952 Mayo emigrated to Australia. Besides teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, she designed murals and tapestries, illustrated books, and wrote for Australian and English periodicals. She also created many beautiful stamp and poster designs depicting the unique flora and fauna of Australia. The Australian Commonwealth series of six postage stamps issued between 1959 and 1962 and featuring platypus, kangaroo, banded anteater, tiger cat, rabbit bandicoot and Tasmanian tiger, was awarded the Vizard-Wholohan Prize for prints in 1962. It was one of the earliest representations of Australian flora and fauna on stamps, and the first series to be designed by a woman. Black Swans, colored linocut In 1962 Mayo moved to New Zealand to be close to her family, and in 1965 she settled in Christchurch, where she continued to live until her death in 1994. She taught at the University of Canterbury until 1972, and worked for more than three years on an underwater diorama with Otago Museum. After being a founding member of Sydney Printmakers, she was on the Print Council of New Zealand, but it was only when she retired that she was able to buy a printing press and make prints full-time. After she started suffering from severe arthritis, Mayo turned to the easier medium of silkscreen prints, but in 1985 she was forced to stop. Days before her death, she was created a Dame of the British Empire. Humpback and Bottleneck screenprint, 1980 Many thanks to The Visual Telling of Stories for uploading its precious scans!
“You now have learned enough to see / That Cats are much like you and me / And other people whom we find / Possessed of various types of mind.” A gem from the lost 1953 treasure Best Ca…
Eileen Mayo established a career as an artist and teacher in England before emigrating to Australia in 1953. She first made prints in 1928 with the encouragement of Claude Flight, producing wood engravings and linocuts as well as book illustrations ...
