Biography

Gounil Brown was born Gunnel Hallin in Gothenburg, Sweden on 3 July 1926 to Sven Hallin and Ingrid Hallin (neé Sieurin). She was a twin sister to Barbro, and had a brother, Olle, who was older by six years. She studied art in Stockholm and Oslo, where she specialised in portraiture, life drawing and illustration.

In Stockholm Gunnel joined a painting studio with a group of people who had fled Norway prior to German occupation and were returning home in the immediate aftermath of the War. There, she felt the influence of Edvard Munch and Kaj Fjell.

In 1948 she left Scandinavia for Paris to study at the Centre d’Art Sacré, a place recommended to her by French Dominicans. There, she met her future husband, the Englishman Philip Brown, a fellow student. They married on 18th May 1950 at the Priory Church of St. Benedict in Ealing, London. On her marriage, Gunnel changed her name to Gounil to preserve the Swedish pronunciation in the English voice. They produced five daughters, Ursula, Philippa, Carole, Christina and Antonia.

Gounil produced an array of work during her married life. In collabaration with her husband, she produced a series of stained-glass windows for churches and cathedrals, including the early work of the Annunciation at the St Mary the Virgin in Lydden, Rose Windows in the Church of St Mark near Regent’s Park in London and the Church of St Paul in Crofton, Kent. Amongt their most notable work in stained glass are two windows in St John’s cathedral in Umtata, South Africa.

In 1970, Gounil and her husband moved from England to San Lorenzo de El Escorial in the Guadarrama mountains in Spain with their youngest two daughters. From there, they moved south to Marbella on the Costa del Sol and then, in Easter 1972, to Fuengirola. In 1975 they moved to Costa Blanca to the small village of Alfaz del Pi. In the early 1980s, they spent more time in the south of France before finally moving back to England in the summer of 1983.

Gounil has continued to paint and draw throughout her life with the emphasis on portraiture, but has also taken her work into other areas. Notably, she has sculpted many clay heads. Perhaps her greatest pleasure, however, has been in poetry, both in her ground-breaking translations from Swedish into English of Edith Södergran (1892-1923), but also others such as Gustaf Fröding (1860-1911), Hjalmar Gullberg (1898-1961) and Nils Ferlin (also 1898-1961). Gounil is also a poet in her own right, and has published her own poerty alongside her translations.