My friend Sam Zwemmer, who has died aged 68 of lung cancer, was an upholsterer, interior designer, furniture painter, decorator, calligrapher, muralist and, most recently, a botanical artist. To all these decorative crafts she brought a meticulous and stylish exuberance, qualities that also reflected her personality. She could paint anything on anything: the battle of Waterloo on a tea chest or a frilly corset on a dressmaker's dummy.
Her botanical work consisted of giant canvases of the voluptuous: tulips, lilies, flag irises (never any shrinking violets). Her paintings were at first considered too unconventional for the Royal Horticultural Society, but later it agreed that her work was too good to ignore, and she exhibited at RHS shows all over the country.
She was born Sandra Paine and was brought up in north London by a single mother, a dancer who ran the Hampstead Ballet Club (she only met her artist father once). She went to Parliament Hill school and then to St Martin's School of Art, and in her late teens opened a shop in Hampstead Antique Emporium, selling her own painted furniture. Her son, Dominic, was born in 1966.
Sam had a 1960s model beauty, and wore clothes with aplomb. I remember her at that time in a pair of green satin hot pants, stunning the regulars at a down-at-heel pub off Edgware Road. With her first husband, Max Zwemmer, she moved in 1970 to Lincolnshire, where her daughter, Hattie, was born. Sam and Max later divorced; she lived in Boston for the last 26 years of her life.
Sam cast a beady eye on metropolitan opinion and trends. She was never a champion of leftwing politics, which is why we might have parted company. But we never did. She loved history – battles and kings and queens – and was knowledgable about her heroes, usually unpopular figures such as Richard III.
For the past 15 years she had lived most happily with her second husband, John Jackson, who shared her interest in the theatre, in particular in Shakespeare. They worked together to save Boston's Blackfriars Arts Centre, and both were closely involved with the Boston Playgoers Society, where Sam was director, producer and set designer for many productions. Eleven years ago, she and John bought a derelict 18th-century town house in France; they restored it themselves, on a shoestring.
Clever and funny, often alarmingly blunt and uncompromising, she was a loyal and generous friend, and was brave and unsentimental during her illness.
She is survived by John, Dominic and Hattie.