Ursula Elisabeth Frisch

https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2006/11/ursula-blau.html

The following is something I, Ulla Frisch's daugter Monica, wrote a few week's ago Ulla Frisch 1921 - 2019

Ulla Frisch, neé Blau, was born in Vienna on 16th March 1921, but came to the United Kingdom in 1938. Her mother was German but her father was of Jewish extraction, though not a practising Jew, which was why she and her two brothers left Austria.

As a young woman she went to art school and had a variety of jobs during and after the Second World War. While working as an assistant to a London photographer, Lotte Meitner-Graf, who had also come from Vienna, she met Lotte's nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, who was a professor of physics in Cambridge. They married in 1951, settled in Cambridge and produced me and my brother Tony.

While we were young she continued working as a graphic artist, doing book illustrations and other work, I think in part to supplement the family income. She also had published three books on crafts for children. Later she developed as an artist, exhibiting regularly with the Cambridge Drawing Society. She was primarily a relief printer, making woodcuts and fine wood engravings, but explored other media, and also worked in clay. She made pottery bowls and other items and clay sculptures, mostly of animals. Later she developed a distinctive approach to mixed media, combining her prints with collage and drawing. After her husband died and with my brother and I both having left home, her art became her major activity. She travelled around England sketching in various local churches, went on courses and continued exhibiting until 2007, when poor eyesight and increasing arthritis started limiting her activities.

In December 2014 she had a fall resulting in several weeks in hospital and never regained the ability to live independently. So we arranged a series of live-in carers. This continued until May 2017 when it eventually became clear that carers could not manage. Reluctantly Ulla was moved to a small nursing home in Cambridge where they had the staff and equipment to look after her properly and keep her comfortable. She didn't like not being in her own home and no longer being independent and gradually declined. By late summer 2019 she was not eating much, getting very frail and no longer seeming very aware of anything around her. So it was little surprise when she died, peacefully in her sleep, on 24th September 2019, at the age of 98.

Monica Frisch, September 2019