Sybil Andrews biography in Biographies from the artzine on artrepublic.com

Sybil Andrews’s interest in art began whilst working as an oxyacetylene airline welder in the First World War. During this time she took John Hassall’s* art correspondent course which introduced her to a number of different artistic media. 

After the War she returned to her birthplace, Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk. Here she met Cyril Power who would influence her work, and with whom she would share a workshop for much of her early working life. They would also later collaborate on commissions from The London Passenger Transport Board, jointly signed with the pseudonym ‘Andrew Power’.

Wishing to pursue her interests in art Andrews enrolled at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, London. But it was not until she became school secretary and attended Claude Flight’s linocut classes at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art that Andrews really found her métier, and she quickly became another acolyte of Flight’s enthusiasm for the colour linocut. 

Whilst Andrews’ works evidence this assimilation of Flight’s formal language, they often depart from a depiction of the kinds of subjects – the dynamism of the modern world, its concern with speed and with technological advances – that Flight encouraged. Instead, Andrews more often sought to capture the rhythms and living movements of the human figure. She explored various sporting activities to this end, including football, horseback riding and motorcycle racing, as also activities associated with men’s physical work. 

During the Second World War Andrews worked in a shipyard where she met her husband, and soon after (1947) the couple emigrated to the remote logging town of Campbell River on Vancouver Island, Canada. Here she achieved a large following which lasted well into the 1950’s. In the ‘60’s she fell into obscurity, but was rediscovered in the 1970’s. She died in 1992 leaving a body of work totalling almost 80 linocuts.