Sadly, Colette Morey de Morand died on Friday, 9 December 2022 at St Marys Hospital, Paddington.

Colette was one of the original members of RAG when it began in 1986. She exhibited in our first exhibition at Fulham Palace in 1987 and took part in most of our exhibitions since. She was always a willing participant in RAG activities: attending meetings, participating in Artist Talks and making her studio available for group collections of artworks, notably for the Spanish exhibitions. (Image: Colette – central holding glass – at the ‘Stars in your Eyes’ Institute of Physics exhibition, 2012).

A committed abstract painter, who consistently produced vibrant and ambitious work, she was always open to art opportunities, from Open Studios to international residencies. I began to get to know her during the week I spent in Moscow for RAG’s exhibition there in 1988; and then in 1990, working for a month in the Artists Union studios in Cheyuskinskaya, Moscow, with nine other RAG artists and about 60 soviet artists. Various high profile receptions and dinners were laid on for us and, at one of the first, when the dance music started, Colette broke the ice by confidently walking across the floor to ask the director to dance. She was a participant in life, in art, in conversation and in books and culture. As part of the Russian Exchange, RAG hosted 30 soviet artists in London. Colette threw a party for them in her flat in Melbury Road, Kensington (the ex-studio of Holman Hunt) to which she had generously invited a number of well known British artists who she was friends with, including John Hoyland and Patrick Caulfield. She was also a good friend of Paula Rego – they had adjacent studios in Berry Street, Clerkenwell for a number of years. She was, with Paula and G. Calvert, at Victor Willing’s exhibition in 2019 at Hastings Contemporary.

   Colette with Graham High, 2015

In 1968 she met Clement Greenberg in New Zealand and later worked in her friend, Anthony Caro’s Triangle Workshop in New York State, where she would steal Larry Poon’s ‘wasted’ paint to make her own work.

She completed residencies in Galicia, Bulgaria, Turkey, India, Berlin, the USA, Ireland, the UK and more.

Colette, with her roots in Paris, Canada, New Zealand, White Russia and the UK operated in an international modernist tradition and maintained a committed practice over decades. In the critical re-evaluation that seems to be taking place at the moment regarding overlooked women and minority artists, Colette deserves a much higher profile and recognition for her contribution to British Abstract Painting over the last 40 years.

But on a more personal note… it was always a delight and a huge pleasure to meet and spend time with Colette, to talk, to look at paintings. We will miss her.

CMdM: “Geometric abstraction has a working space that is not illusionist, but a space created for its own purposes. Made by a kind of intuitive synthesis, my paintings float in infinite space, shifting layers that are neither figure nor ground, or are both figure and ground, …perceptions are altered and ambushed… And the focus can wander between infinite space and the minute.”

“Certainly, everything I experience is in the work… Painting is a translation into visual language of invisible states of mind engendered by our emotional and intellectual responses to our existence… Translation into painting is beautifully complex, since it is the materiality that carries the ideas forward.” From An Interview with Artist C. Morey de Morand by Julie Karabenick, Geoform, 2005 (booklet and website) www.geoform.net.

“As with all Morey de Morand’s work, the point is not what is known but what is felt, what is left to be imagined.“ Charles Darwent, art critic of the Independent on Sunday, from the introduction to her show at Poussin Gallery, 2010

“Encountering Colette initially during the planning and delivery of the RAG Russian exchanges, was one of the most crucial influences in my life as a woman artist. Her indomitable and relentless focus on painting, the curiosity, honesty and joy with which she met everything else in life, was the example I needed and will always treasure.” G. Calvert

To see her paintings view her page on this site, and on www.cmoreydemorand.co.uk and www.thelondongroup.co.uk

Brian Deighton, December 2022