In 1951, Potter moved with her husband to
Aldeburgh on the east coast of Suffolk and lived in
The Red House which she swapped, in 1957, for Crag House, owned by
Benjamin Britten, with whom she became a close friend after her divorce in 1955. With her children grown, she spent long hours painting. By mixing paint with beeswax, she achieved a "chalky luminous quality" using a "pale and subtle" range of colours, In his essay for the catalogue of her 1965
Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition,
Mary Potter Paintings 1938–1964, museum director
Kenneth Clark said Potter's works "exist in the domain of seeing and feeling; we know that they are exactly right in the same way that we know a singer to be perfectly in tune"; he described her paintings as "enchanting moments of heightened perception". In the 1960s and 1970s Potter gained increasing recognition. From 1967 she had seven solo shows with the New Art Centre in London, which continued to champion her work following her death, holding a further five Mary Potter exhibitions. She was awarded an
OBE in 1979, and major retrospective exhibitions of her work were shown at the
Tate Gallery in 1980 and the
Serpentine Gallery in 1981, which opened to great critical acclaim a few months before her death. In a review of that exhibition in
The Sunday Times,
Marina Vaizey wrote: "The results over the past several decades have been paintings of the most exquisite tensile webs of pale resonant colour, the subjects almost vanished, but the echoes imaginatively suggesting the fullness of life: an evanescent evocation of the shapes and surroundings in which people live. The very delicacy is paradoxically full-blooded". Also in 1981 Potter won the John Moores prize. The John Moore prize was awarded by The Walker Gallery to encourage lesser known artists to participate in the art world. William Packer the art critic commented on Mary Potter’s art work, for the
Financial Times, after one of her shows calling it, “very English, and very good.” He compared her work to that of
Victor Pasmore, “Those much-vaunted paintings of his, of the Thames along Chiswick Reach made just after the war, are more than equalled by her comparable and contemporaneous images of the breezy, spray-swept front at Brighton, and her views of Regent's Park and in the Zoo." She died of lung cancer, at age 81, at her home in Aldeburgh. == Selected collections ==