In 1987, the BBC aired a documentary called Painting With Light in which six artists were filmed making work with a computer graphics system called Quantel Paintbox. One of the six was Jennifer Bartlett, who has died of leukaemia aged 81.
Bartlett was variously the odd one out in the series. All the other artists – Larry Rivers, David Hockney, Sidney Nolan, Richard Hamilton and Howard Hodgkin – were men. Not coincidentally, they remain household names in the modern art world, where the prodigiously creative Bartlett is now rather less well known than she was 35 years ago. But she also stood out from the six in being the hardest of them to pigeonhole, her art defining itself by being defiantly unlike anybody else’s.
