Daphne Cousins was an extraordinary artist whose career spanned from the early 1960s until around 2022.
To understand her paintings, one must first understand her relationship with music. She possessed a profound love of classical music, and it was impossible to separate her visual imagination from the sounds that nourished it.
Before beginning a new work, she would often listen to a piece of music with absolute concentration, many times, examining the score and listening to it in her head .
Colours and images were already forming in her mind. Yet when she painted, there was complete silence. The music had already done its work.
Her studio reflected the same quiet discipline that characterised her art. She sat not at an easel but at the neatest desk imaginable, every brush standing perfectly upright in its pot, her belove gouache paints arranged in carefully considered colour harmonies. Nothing was accidental. There were no overturned water pots, no theatrical gestures. Daphne was meticulous.
Beneath this meticulous practice lay an unexpectedly mathematical mind. Colour, for Daphne, was never merely intuitive. She thought in terms of chromatic harmonies and dissonances, constructing relationships between colours with the same intelligence that a composer constructs relationships between notes. Her paintings were composed with meticulous precision.
Music had shaped her from an early age. As a student she sang in Manchester Cathedral Choir, where she learned plain chant and complex polyphony. That ability to hold several independent voices together found its visual equivalent in her paintings.
I shared much of my creative life with Daphne over thirty-five years. We attended countless concerts together. Bartók occupied a special place in her imagination, alongside Sibelius and Ricard Strauss. She described their music as colourful , masterful and completely compelling because her synesthetic imagination translated sound directly into visual experience.
She loved walking in Glencoe, where she felt her paintings formed in her unconscious. After her death in 2024, her ashes were scattered there.
We visited major exhibitions in London over all those years . Daphne never read the wall texts first. She allowed the paintings themselves to speak. I learned more about art from her than from anyone else I have known. But after the exhibition we often bought the catalogue to discuss what we had seen in the light of the scholarship.
Although our lives took different paths, our friendship endured. We continued to attend concerts and share music and art . Her collection of classical vinyl recordings was impressive, often with several interpretations of the same work by different conductors, which as she aged she relied on more and more for inspiration .
She also loved Brazilian jazz. Remarkably, she once observed that this music appeared to her not in colour but in black-and-white rhythms, leading to a series of striking monochrome works.
She was an introvert, but an extraordinary teacher of fine art. We sometimes shared a teaching studio, where I taught textile students and she taught fine art. She delighted in colour and the fabrics I chose and would send her students to see how, as she put it, ‘the colour dances “in the odalisque set up I made in homage to Matisse.’
In the final years of her life she continued to paint for as long as she was able. Illness gradually reduced her manual dexterity, but never her imagination. We spoke many times each week about art, music and colour.
Daphne disliked grand theories about her work. What fascinated her was the process of making: colour, harmony, rhythm and the emotional power of music and of course the process of preparation , thinking and the craft
In her final days I would ask, ‘Shall I play you some music?’ I already knew the answer.
She should be remembered not simply as an extraordinary painter, but as someone who lived at the meeting point of sound and colour, translating one into the other with extraordinary intelligence, discipline and sensitivity.