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Biography
Mary Armour (nee Steel) was born in Blantyre, Lanarkshire and attended Hamilton Academy where her art instructor was the redoubtable Penelope Beaton who later went on to teach at the Edinburgh College of Art. In 1920, Armour entered the Glasgow School where she trained under Maurice Greiffenhagen and David Forrester Wilson. There she also encountered a fellow student, also to become an RSA, William Armour whom she married in 1927. She was the second woman, after Anne Redpath in 1952, to be elected to the RSA in 1958. From an early age she used paint adventureously to develop rich, solid textures against which she would juxtapose vibrant, vivid colour, particularly in her flower and still life paintings. A special strength was her ability to create shafts/angles of light within paintings which then cast shadows through brightly coloured flasks again backgrounds of mottled chiaroscuro. (See Still life with pineapple, currently displayed) |
