Description

Sybil Andrews was one of the most important artists of the British linocut movement from the 1910s through the 1940s. In 1925, she enrolled at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where she studied with the artist Claude Flight, who taught her to print from blocks of linoleum, which was inexpensive and readily available. Andrews believed that modern art should evoke the spirit of its time, and her prints of the 1920s and 1930s recorded the rapid pace of modern life, focusing on the expression of its rhythms, patterns, forms, and colors.

Throughout her career, Andrews made a total of seventy-six color linocuts. Red Cedars was executed after her emigration with her husband, Walter Morgan, to a remote logging town on Vancouver Island, Canada, following World War II (1939-45). This composition describes her appreciation of the rural locale. The assertive, vivid colors and dynamic patterning that had characterized her early work are simplified into a pure, almost abstracted landscape.