Reg Pepper (Joanna Carrington)
British (1931-2003)
Born in 1931 at Hampstead in north London, Joanna Carrington ( Reg Pepper) studied painting with Cedric Morris in Suffolk and Fernand Leger in Paris. She then went to the Central School in London where she studied under Mervyn Peake and Keith Vaughan. While at the Central, Carrington won a Queen’s Scholarship and was included in a group exhibition, Six Young Contemporaries, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in central London. Carrington was the niece of the celebrated Bloomsbury painter Dora Carrington. Joanna Carrington painted in two very distinctive styles. Reg Pepper was a colorful and witty ‘sophisticated’ primitive, the alter ego of Joanna Carrington who painted beautifully observed landscapes and still lifes in a post-impressionist manner.
Carrington’s first solo exhibition was in 1962. In 1966, she exhibited works at the Upper Grosvenor Gallery and at Crane Arts. Carrington contributed a series of articles on painting to the The Times, which were eventually published in book form as Landscape Painting for Beginners in 1971. In 1973, Carrington adopted the pseudonym Reg Pepper. Even after her identity was revealed, by the Sunday Times in 1981, Carrington’s Pepper work still continued to sell well. In 1984, as Pepper, Carrington was commissioned to illustrate a children’s book.
