OBE, RA, RSA, RWWS, Hon.d.Litt. Born in Falkirk, she studied at Edinburgh University and at Edinburgh College of Art. She is a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Society of Scottish Artists and the Glasgow Institute. She is Honorary Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland.
A painter in oils and watercolours, as well as a prolific printmaker (etchings and lithographs), she exhibits with the societies listed above, and has had many one-man shows since 1959. In London she has been represented by the Mercury Gallery since 1965. She has travelled in Italy, France and Japan. She was a lecturer at Edinburgh from 1962 to 1986.
Her painting and graphic work is remarkable for the orchestration of small evocative images and marks over a wide general field, some-times closely derived from still-life assemblages, flowers or landscapes, sometimes using collage, gold leaf or other mixed-media, and sometimes verging on the abstract; often her pictures have extended passages over which all these elements are scattered in seemingly loose, informal arrangements.
She has executed some portrait commissions: 'Molly Hunter' (Scottish National Portrait Gallery); 'Lady Mitchison' (National Portrait Gallery, London). Her work is in many other public collections in Britain and the United States, including the Tate Gallery, The Scottish National Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Glasgow Museum and Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
LIT: 'Elizabeth Blackadder', Judith Bumpus, Phaidon, 1988.