Image: Jo at Studland, Dorset
It is with great sadness that Riverside Artists Group announces the death of its valued member Joanna Brendon MBE, 14 July 1944- 14 May 2025.
Joanna joined RAG in 2020 as Covid began and during the difficult Lockdowns when our members supported the group by presenting exhibitions online (insta: @riversideartistsgroup). Although weakened by her own illness, Jo was a conscientious and brilliant person who contributed wholeheartedly to every exhibition.
She was born in Plymouth in 1944, the younger of two children, to her father, Robert Brendon and her mother Josephine (nee Price). Her father owned the family printing firm of Clarke, Doble and Brendon. She was educated at Stover School for Girls in Newton Abbot, Devon.
In her early London years she worked at the New Art Centre in Sloane Street, while also fundraising for Margot Fonteyn’s retirement Gala at the Royal Opera House. Following a chance meeting on a bus, she became the Organising Secretary for the Joost de Blank Memorial Fund (an anti-apartheid charity). Here she organised a fundraising auction at Sotheby’s with contributions from Barbara Hepworth and David Hockney. It was through this work that she became the first director of St John’s, Smith Square where, from 1969-1985, she worked tirelessly overseeing its transition into one of London’s major concert halls. ‘There were so many highlights,’ she wrote: ‘Rostropovich’s first recital in the West, stunning concerts from the famous BBC Lunchtime Concerts, premieres, EBU (European Broadcasting Union) concerts going out to over a dozen countries simultaneously… helped to quickly put it on the musical map of London.’
She received an MBE for her work at St. John’s.
Image: St John’s, Smith Square
In 1985 she became ill with rheumatoid arthritis and, with some reluctance, she retired from St. John’s. It did not stop her studying for an MA in print-making, though at the same time she was going blind in one eye. With characteristic fortitude, she decided to write her thesis on the question: Do Visual Artists Need To See? Exploring Alternative Perceptions. Three prints from her Sightlines series are in the permanent collection at the V&A. A larger selection was displayed at the Saatchi Gallery, and the whole series is now on permanent display at Moorfields Eye Hospital.
After her degree she developed her painting and was for a while the Artist in Residence at Brantwood House Museum, home of John Ruskin, in Cumbria.
She also became the chair from 2001 to 2011 of Artists At Home, an organisation “which had been created almost accidentally by a handful of artists down by the river, and took it to the next level, as it grew into a well organised group that represented artists from a wide area, covering Chiswick, Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith.” (Bridget Osborne, The Chiswick Calendar).
Jo never let her illness get in the way of her determination to work, and to do things. She took dance classes with Move Into Wellbeing to stay as mobile as she could for as long as she could. Latterly she was supported by the Hammersmith Society of Friends (The Quakers), as well as by her friends. She was always a great encourager of others and in recent years had become a telephone volunteer for the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society.
Image: Jurassic Coast 1, oil on canvas
“Her expressive landscape-based paintings were essentially about a place, rather than of it. She worked in series, so that one painting informed another, and the gestation period could be months, or even years.” (Sarah Granville, Riverside Artists Group)
Nicholas Usherwood, curator and art critic, explains: “With a landscape subject matter that is often intensely familiar to her, Joanna Brendon’s bold, abstracting way of working creates paintings rich in dramatic feeling and entirely mysterious in character”. A three-year old once said: “Do you use magic in your pictures?”. (taken from Joanna Brendon, RAG website).
Many will miss Jo, not only for her paintings but also for her enthusiasm, her support and her generosity. She died at home.
A fuller obituary is in the Chiswick Calendar, May 2025 and The Times 16 June 2025
Image: Back Gardens,, charcoal on paper