Gillian Ayres obituary

One of Britain’s most popular abstract painters known for her huge vibrant canvases bursting with colourGillian Ayres, who has died aged 88, was one of Britain’s most significant abstract painters, a woman of much vitality and generosity, and a domestic person on a grand, overspilling scale. Her huge, improvised canvases, with paint sometimes an inch or two thick, were often worked on in sitting-rooms and bedrooms while Ayres’s bantams, peacocks, cats and dogs roamed freely fro