Colette Morey de Morand was born in Paris in 1934, to a French father and Ukrainian mother. Whilst she was an infant her family moved to Canada, where she was to spend her formative years.
Although she always had designs on being an artist, her mother made her take a science degree at the University of Toronto as a more ‘sensible’ option. Morey de Morand, however, was not to be deterred and not long after graduating she moved to New Zealand, first studying at Wellington University and later establishing a reputation for herself as a landscape painter. Whilst in New Zealand she met Clement Greenberg, the high priest of Abstract Expressionism, an encounter that could well have been significant in her shift in direction towards abstraction, which she was to explore for the rest of her career.
On separating from her first husband, Morey de Morand travelled overland through India and the Far East with her two young children, arriving in London in 1975, where she was to stay for the rest of her life – although she carried on showing in New Zealand, where her work continued to be highly regarded. She was soon ensconced in the London art scene – albeit the part of the scene that set itself against the prevailing fashion for Minimalism and Conceptualism. She had met Anthony Caro and his wife, the painter Sheila Girling, in New Zealand and they were to remain close friends throughout their lives. Both artists’ approaches at that time – loose, lyrical (even for Caro when working in heavy slabs of metal) – were to find confluences in her painting of the same period.