Brenda Pye - As Brenda Pye

As Brenda Pye

In 1961, she married again. Her second husband, with whom she was to live for the next 33 years, until he died in 1994, was Cecil Pye, the stepfather of the playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn and nephew of the founder of the Pye radio and television manufacturing business. He had a studio built for her in the grounds of his Jacobean farmhouse in Buxted, Sussex, and Brenda Pye (as she now was), entered her most prolific period as an artist.

She was commissioned to paint many portraits, including the journalist and broadcaster Fyfe Robertson and the Headmaster of the London Oratory School John McIntosh OBE. Her portraits were exhibited in London at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and in Paris at the Paris Salon.

However, most of her work was now landscape painting in oil on canvas (sometimes, however, with palette knife or on wood), and she particularly loved Ashdown Forest, which she painted over and over again. She also painted during travels with her husband in Scotland and France, and to a lesser extent in Wales, Portugal, Italy and South Africa.

Her style became softer and more impressionistic than her work during and before the war, but it was only occasionally purely abstract. Her favoured medium was always oil on canvas, but she also painted on board or wood (mainly flowers), and (especially in the later 1970s and 1980s) in watercolour. After her second marriage, she favoured brighter colours and a softer, less precise draughtsmanship than before the War and she was a very rapid worker, whether painting portraits or landscape. She always painted directly from life: never from photographs and usually without preparatory drawings.

Her landscapes and flower paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon, and in London by the Royal Society of British Artists and the Association of Women Artists. She also had one-woman exhibitions of her work in Sussex.