Green and White
- Artist: Sandra Blow
- Date: 1969
- Medium: Acrylic paint, ash and charcoal on canvas
- Dimensions: unconfirmed: 3048 x 3048 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
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About this artwork
This is the painting “Green and White” by Sandra Blow, created in 1969. It’s a square canvas, roughly 3 metre on each side, worked with acrylic paint, ash and charcoal. What’s really fascinating is the story behind the surface. Blow mixed ash she’d made from burning nuts in her studio stove and layered it over the paint. Half‑finished, a visitor slipped in and cut the canvas with a knife—an accidental vandalism. Rather than abandon the piece, she sewed the edges together, glued strips of canvas to the front and back, and then painted over the repair. She says, “Miraculously… it was a perfect conclusion to the whole painting.”
Blow was known for using both conventional and unconventional materials to push abstraction forward. In this work you can see the geometric, non‑representational language she favoured, yet the green‑white colour scheme hints at a soft landscape. The painting was presented to the collection in 1994 by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest. It now hangs in the Modern and Contemporary British Art room of Tate Britain.
See it in person
Green and White is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
