Lorna Binns

Watercolourist who relearnt her art

Lorna Emily Harrison, artist: born Wadsley Bridge, Yorkshire 23 October 1914; married 1940 John Binns (died 1980; two daughters); died Lancing, West Sussex 10 September 2003.

Lorna Binns used to say that a tutorial spent with the artist Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art was the most important half-hour of her life.

Although she herself was studying fashion at the college, she had entered a drawing for a competition. Nash, who was an external assessor, had spotted it and sent word that he liked the picture and wished to see her. She was, she said, "very inarticulate and very shy, and so was he". Nash had been badly gassed during the First World War and used a throat spray all the time he was talking and did not look up while he spoke but only concentrated on her watercolour sketch. Using a strip of neutral paper he demonstrated that she should not divide colour with black lines, as she had done in the drawing. "Colour on either side changes the colour in the middle," he said. Binns was insistent: "That was the most important thing ever, ever, said to me."

It was all he discussed, knowing that it was the key to her future, and the remark coloured, literally, her own creative work for the rest of her life. It had not been her intention to do so but she became an artist. She worked in watercolour, the medium which was natural to her, for she never used oil or even gouache; she painted with an exquisite poetic instinct and her pictures are full of movement and light and shimmering with colour.

She was born Lorna Harrison in the village of Wadsley Bridge, near Sheffield, the youngest of three children. Her paternal grandfather had been head engraver for the Manchester Guardian but, with the decline in engraving, the family had lost money and moved to Sheffield to find work. Her father set up a firm making decorative leaded lights for new houses, and he also made furniture with stained glass. (An uncle was the glazier for Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire.)

The family home was full of her father's and grandfather's watercolours, and Binns thought them very old-fashioned until she herself began to paint, and then she understood how good they were. At the age of 10 she won a scholarship to the Abbeydale Grammar School for Girls in Sheffield - the teachers insisted that she be called "Laura" because they thought the name Lorna pretentious.

Naturally talented, she had drawn all her life but her art mistress did not believe that she could be so good and accused her of tracing drawings from Ivanhoe: this, she said, was her first experience of injustice in life, and she glowered at her teacher for the next four years. From school she went to Sheffield College of Art. Although the teaching was rigid and unimaginative, at the end of four years she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.

The School of Design, in which she had won a place, obliged her to study architecture for a year (she won a prize for a plan for a penguin pool) but at last she was able to study her great love - fashion. Even after half a century Binns could describe with an almost sensual pleasure the clothes she had made, recalling how they had been cut and stitched, the texture of the fabric - some of which she had spun herself, and how they had hung from the body. To design, make a pattern, cut, sew and fit a dress might take about a fortnight; the clothes themselves were bought by the fashionable London ladies who paid for the material.

In 1938 she was awarded a fourth-year continuation scholarship, at the end of which she would have gone to Paris to pursue a career as a fashion designer. However, war broke out. For a short period she taught fashion illustration at Tottenham Technical College but, with no money and in order to avoid the Blitz, Binns returned to Yorkshire. Instead of being in a Paris fashion house, she found herself on a farm near Skipton.

At the beginning of 1940 she married John Binns, a fellow student - of industrial design - at the RCA, but it was impossible for the couple to live together, and Lorna's career in fashion seemed over before it had started. While he was sent to Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire to make models from reconnaissance films of northern France, she was conscripted to work as a clerk for a firm of leather workers in Keighley. Here, she said, she learnt how the working women lived, and it seemed to her too that, although many of the factory women were practically illiterate, in communal singing they sang like angels.

At the end of the war the couple went to live in Chelsea and then to Kingston upon Thames, where John Binns was Head of the Design School at the College of Art. They worked together as artists for the taxidermist Roland Hill (for whom they designed paper and leopard-skin hats) and made a mosaic for the Weymouth Theatre which had been built by Oliver Hill. They also designed candlewick bedspreads and Viyella fabric for the Ideal Home exhibition.

In later years she felt that she had accepted all too readily the traditional role of willing partner and housewife and this had been to the detriment of her own creativity. It was only as her children began to grow up that Lorna Binns herself began to paint for herself, finding time in the evening after high tea. When she began again she discovered that she did not even know how to mix colours and had to teach herself to paint afresh.

Her early academic training having led to a hatred of still life, most of Binns's work is concerned with landscape, although she also painted architecture and intense, intimate studies of flowers. Together with her artist friend Joan Vernon-Cryer she travelled widely in Europe. Venice was a particular delight: "When I am looking for a subject, I see something very beautiful which excites me and in that moment the reason for working and the final feeling of the painting is born."

Perhaps because her natural manner was so fluid and so simplified, she had a particular talent for painting water. The flashing, darting shapes and colours of koi carp which she watched in Kew Gardens inspired a series of watercolours which she regarded as a highlight of her career. A painting she made of the runners in the first London Marathon "massed like dahlia petals" was used as a cover for Reader's Digest. Her pictures are in collections worldwide.

In 1973 Lorna Binns was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society. Membership gave her enormous pleasure and she enjoyed the friendship, companionship - and gossip - which the society offered. It also gave her recognition as an artist, which was a matter she took seriously.

A short, slim figure (she said she had been tiny as a child), and always beautifully dressed, by nature she was kind, modest, shrewd, principled, always generous in her praise. A religious background had influenced both her views and her art. Many things amused her and she had a fund of stories - often told against herself - which she related with peals of laughter. The National Sound Archive at the British Library holds recordings of Lorna Binns in conversation.

After her husband's death from a stroke in 1980, Binns moved to a small house in Surbiton with its yellow curtains ("Something has to be yellow in life"), shelves of teapots and her own paintings on her walls (those with green spots on were for sale). In later years she suffered from ill-health and moved finally into residential care in Lancing, although she was painting until the end of her life - her last pictures were of beach huts.

For her funeral everyone was instructed to wear bright colours. She was also very curious to know what any obituary of her might say.

Simon Fenwick