SHE’S a Southampton nonagenarian and one of the city’s most prolific artists.

Her work is bold, full of colour and shows a lust for life - exploring themes as diverse as pilgrimages to Mecca, the wonders of the galaxy and trimming the garden hedge.

Now Southampton City Art Gallery is honouring her life’s work with a major retrospective.

Born in Monton near Manchester in 1926, Hilda Margery Clarke moved to Southampton in 1954.

But it was a chance meeting with a friend of a friend which led her to pursue art as a career.

At the age of 13 she met a man who was to become one of the UK’s most celebrated painters.

LS Lowry was in his fifties when he and Margery met, and they remained lifelong friends until his death in 1976.

And it was Lowry who encouraged Margery to take up art.

Speaking to the Daily Echo from her home in Bitterne she described the first time she met the painter, whose work chronicles the working classes of the industrial north.

She said: “He had had the very traumatic experience of nursing his mother right up until her death. And I could sense something in him.

"Looking back now I suppose it was grief.

“But he was very good fun, very interesting and cultured and he had a great sense of humour. He didn’t like people being condescending and he definitely wasn’t.”

After some informal classes with him in the 1940s she started classes with Peter Folkes at Southampton Art College, going on to study printmaking for a month at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford.

In addition to her painting she worked as a secretary and looked after son Paul, but in 1968 had the first in a string of ten annual exhibitions at Southampton City Art Gallery.

And in 1984 she set up one of the UK’s first ‘galleries in a house’ at their home on Burnham Chase in Bitterne, with the aim of showing her own work but also to support other local artists and crafters.

Now the exhibition at the city gallery will show around 30 of her works, taken from her collection of thousands of paintings and spanning her entire career.

Called Still Hanging Around it showcases her sense of humour, bold use of colour and shapes - as well as the influence of that famous friend of hers.

With son Paul managing the First Gallery - which is still open by appointment - she still has energy to produce new work and is currently making a new piece ‘the size of a door,’ as well as a copy of an old piece which was originally rejected from a local art group she tried to show it in.

It features a nun wearing a bowler hat - shunned because it was deemed offensive to nuns.

She said: “Lowry saw it and said ‘I’d like to put a bowler hat on her’, but he wouldn’t because he would never want to deface someone’s work. He had a great sense of humour.”

Lead exhibitions officer at Southampton City Council, Dan Matthews said: “Margery has lived in Southampton for over 60 years and is an important and cherished part of the city’s art scene. Her friendship with other artists including L.S. Lowry, Richard Eurich and Eric Meadus has generated interesting influences on her work, and over the course of her artistic career she has honed a distinctive style of painting that is reflected in the exhibition at Southampton city art gallery.”

  • Still Hanging Around - Paintings by Hilda Margery Clarke, 1956 to the present, opens today and continues until April 22.
  • Two further exhibitions, ‘The Morris Dancer and The Rat Catcher: Modern British Figure Paintings from Southampton’s collection’ and ‘Looking At: Abstraction with Stephen Snoddy’ - a selection of ten abstract paintings made in response to pieces from the collection, both opened yesterday.