Canadian-born painter, printmaker, and writer on art who settled in the USA in 1932 and became an American citizen in 1950. She lived mainly in New Mexico, but part of her intermittent studies in art were at Columbia University, New York (1941–2 and 1951–2), and she again lived in New York from 1957 to 1967. During this time she was a neighbour of several other painters (among them Robert *Indiana, Ellsworth *Kelly, and James *Rosenquist) in a block of artists' lofts, but essentially she lived a fairly solitary life. She never owned a television and for the last fifty years of her life never even read a newspaper. Up to the mid-1950s her paintings were representational, but she then turned to abstraction, and by 1964 had arrived at her characteristic type of work—a square monochromatic canvas covered with a fine grid of horizontal and vertical lines: ‘My forms are square, but the grids are never absolutely square…when I cover the square grid surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.