Born in 1913, Eileen Guthrie's father and grandfather were architects and her mother was an accomplished pianist, who had studied at the Royal College of Music (Eileen herself had been taught the piano by Gustav Holst when she was young). She met George Kennethson in 1931 and they shared a lifelong and artistic marriage.
By the 1940s, Eileen turned her hand to making prints for textiles. She did so with incredible success – artistically at least, as there was almost as little money for interiors and design in post-war Britain as there was for art. Eileen did, however, sell her ‘Flockhart Fabrics’ range – named after her Scottish grandfather - at Primavera, a leading interiors shop on Sloane Street, as well as to family and friends.
Their neighbour in Uffington, John Betjeman, also helped them to find stockists, and Eileen’s twin sister Joan would open her London flat to showcase the designs. Lucienne Day, too, introduced Eileen to Amersham Prints, contractors to the government, and her design Bird and Basket was used in 1954 to furnish the Morag Mhor, the first all-aluminium yacht in the country.
Her husband George lent a hand too, on the production side, contributing to designs, working on lino-blocks and silkscreens and helping Eileen with the considerable manual work of printing the fabrics by hand. The prints are deceptively simple, strong and sculptural, whilst retaining the required elegance and beauty. The line that one sees in her gouaches and oils finds an easy home amongst the repeats of fabric design and motifs that infuse George’s sculpture – birds, leaves, architectonic flower forms – which are abstracted from her landscape painting.
