Nina Carroll biography
Nina Carroll, born in 1932, studied art at the Cheltenham School of Art before she went to Oxford University to study English Literature and it was here that she joined the Ruskin School of Art for a while. After Oxford, Nina married John Steane and devoted herself to the upbringing of their three children, Kate, Anna and Peter in Liverpool and then Southport; during this time she painted and wrote only in spare moments. The family moved from Southport to Kettering, Northamptonshire in 1964; here she exhibited locally until in the mid to late 1970s, while Nina was in her early 40s, her painting career took off.
After John became Oxfordshire's County Archaeologist in 1976, John, Nina and Peter moved to live in Oxfordshire. From the very late 1970s Nina juggled painting with part time jobs, assiduous but unsuccessful novel writing and keeping house for John and Peter in Oxford. She held many exhibitions in Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and London and several in other parts of the country and even abroad; she exhibited work at the Royal Academy, New English Art Club, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Institute of Water Colours and the Royal West of England Academy. While a large proportion of her work consists of vibrant landscape watercolours, she also painted a wide variety of other subjects, her creative imagination inspired by the world around her.
Nina died in January 1990 at the age of 57, having suffered from cancer, although she continued to paint up to a few days before the end; her paintings live on, testament to her prolific output. Some six months after Nina's death, the cataloguing and curating of the large collection of her paintings was taken on by Kate.