Ann Thetis Blacker

Ann Thetis Blacker (13 December 1927 – 18 December 2006) was an English painter and singer. She was noted for her richly coloured pictures, especially using the batik dyed fabric process.^[1]

Thetis Blacker was born in Holmbury St Mary, Surrey, England.^[2] She was the daughter of Carlos Paton Blacker, a psychiatrist, and granddaughter of Carlos Blacker, a friend of Oscar Wilde. Blacker intended to be a singer and studied with the German mezzo-soprano singer Elena Gerhardt in London. Blacker appeared in the chorus at Glyndebourne opera in the 1950s and sang the role of Mother Goose (a whore) in The Rake's Progress by Igor Stravinsky. However, she studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London to become a painter and was taught by the wife of the artist Leonard Campbell Taylor, Brenda Moore.

In 1970, Thetis Blacker became a Churchill Fellow and visited India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. She worked at the Batik Research Institute in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She went on to visit Bali and Peru, influencing her style of brightly coloured symbolic pictures using batik dyed fabric.^[3] A number cathedrals and churches in the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe, and the United States commissioned her work including a series of five major pieces based on mythical themes: Apocalypse (at St Andrew's House), Arbor Cosmica, A Bestiary of Mythical Creatures, The Creation (at Winchester Cathedral), and Search for the Simurgh.

Thetis Blacker received commissions for artworks at:^[2]

• St George’s Chapel, Windsor (1997), with an exhibition there in 2000;
• St Albans Abbey;
• Three works in Grey College Chapel at the University of Durham (The Creation of Darkness and Light, Imago Aquarium, and Imago Lucis);
• A Phoenix in the dining hall of Grey College, Durham (2000);
• Banners of St Cuthbert and St Oswald at Durham Cathedral (2001).

Ann Thetis Blacker's work was exhibited at Glyndebourne in 2005. Her dealer was Henry Dyson and she died in Bramley, Surrey in 2006.

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