Naomi Glaister Primrose was born in Glasgow Scotland in 1940 to a Scottish father and a mother from Carlisle in the north of England. She lived in Glasgow until she was six when her family moved to London. Until she was 18, Naomi studied music and art with distinctions in both, and she very much wanted to go to art school, but her parents decided she should go to secretarial school. She spent a year in Paris when she was 19 and is fluent in French.
Naomi met Marc Brandel at party in London in 1961, and moved with him to Laurel Canyon Los Angeles and then to West Cork in 1962. Naomi has always been a broad thinker with a vivacious curiosity, and she was enraptured by Marc’s political and intellectual ideas. She helped him with many of his screenplays and books both with her secretarial skills and as a sounding board for his ideas.
Naomi used her creative flair to create a beautiful home from the ruin they bought in Cappaghglass, Ballydehob in 1962, and began painting the Cappaghglass landscape in acrylics. Nell and Julia Levis in Ballydehob took Naomi and Marc under their wing, and when their first child Tara was born in 1967, Naomi asked Nell and Julia to be Tara’s godmothers. As more artists began to arrive in the area, Naomi and Marc became good friends with many of them especially Chris Reichert and Norah Golden, and John and Noelle Verling. Her second daughter Shaena was born in 1977.
Naomi studied sculpture and painting with John Erland (from the Slade), and with the support of many local West Cork potters and ceramicist especially Pat Connor, Naomi began to develop her ceramic sculptures. Her ceramic work was exhibited at the RDS (where she was awarded distinctions in 1977 and 1978) and she had her first solo exhibition at the Cork Craftsman’s Guild in 1979.
In 1982 Naomi Tara and Shaena moved to England when Naomi trained as an art therapist. She returned to live in West Cork in 1994 and continued to work on her sculptures, bringing the techniques she had learned as an art therapist around plant observation into her ceramic work and paintings. She also wrote a novel After Trelawny which was published in 2008.
Naomi currently lives in Stroud in England with her husband painter Michael Williams, and she continues to paint and sculpt.
Ballydehob Arts Museum 