Audrey Pilkington (1922-2015) was a well-known, painter, designer and illustrator. She was born near Newton in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, attended Lancaster School of Art in 1939, where she was influenced by Ronald Grimshaw, and studied afterwards at the Slade School of Fine Art which was then based in Oxford due to the war. In 1941 she married a fellow art student and glass engraver Patrick Heriz-Smith (1920-2011), and after he became an art teacher at Gordonstoun School in Moray, north east Scotland they settled there. She taught art at a local school and drew for Vogue magazine and designed book jackets for Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape. The family later moved to Plön, Germany, where her husband was head of art at King Alfred School which opened in May 1948 as a co-educational boarding school for the children of the British Armed Forces and Control Commission personnel stationed in the British zone of Germany. In 1954 they returned to the UK as her husband Patrick took up the post of head of art at the Royal Hospital School, Holbrook, in Suffolk. Audrey Pilkington continued to paint, joined Colchester Art Society and exhibited in East Anglia and in London with the Redfern Gallery and at Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road. In 1961 she and her husband established at art centre and art school at Clock House, Bruisyard, near Saxmundham in Suffolk. In 1988 she left Suffolk and settled at Resolven in south Wales, where she continued working as hard as ever. An important retrospective show of her work was held at The Cut, a centre for the Arts in Halesworth, Suffolk, in 2013.