Valerie Thornton

Valerie Thornton, 1931 - 1991.

Valerie discovered her artistic direction while waiting for a friend at Charing Cross station in 1952.  She wandered into an exhibition of photographs and old buildings and realsied immediately that she had found her subject. She found etching to be her favourite medium and soon afterwards worked in the Paris studio of the great print-maker Stanley William Hayter.

Although latterly she had tended to highlight figurative carvings, her key concern was with textrues of flint, brick and stone, merging in the sculptural surfaces of weathered walls.  Her work pays tribute to nameless armies of architects, masons, and labourers and provides an eloquent plea for conservation.

The precision of her finished images often belies a range of experimental techniques used to exploit an unyielding medium.  Of her etchings, John Rothenstein once observed that in her hands, the etched plate has an almost sculpted presence.

Valerie Thornton travelled widely, living in the United States for a year and drawing on frequent visits to ancient sites in France and Italy.Later she exhibited more widely still - her work being bought for public collections all over the world and shown in scores of private galleries.

exerpts from Obituary, The Guardian, Friday 29th March 1991

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