My husband, Brian Elliott, who has died aged 85, was an artist whose creativity celebrated the pleasure of seeing and perception, and whose painting radiated an intense delight in and boundless enthusiasm for life. His work evolved from early Constructivist forms through abstract triptychs to large figurative images.
He had entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1956, and with his brother, Michael, subsequently set up a studio and print room in Kennington, where he began an intense study of screenprinting techniques. By 1964 he had had an invitation from Ian Jenkins, the Slade secretary, to establish a screenprinting department at the school, which led to Brian taking up the post of lecturer there for the next five and a half years. In 1969 the Oxford University Press published his book Silk-Screen Printing.
Throughout the 1960s Brian also exhibited paintings and prints in continental Europe, Canada, the US and Argentina, and staged three one-man shows in London. His work was acquired by private collectors, as well as institutions such as the V&A, University College London and the universities of Reading, Sussex and York.
In 1969 he participated in an exhibition to promote Carl Foreman and Dmitri Tiomkin’s film Mackenna’s Gold, and was subsequently invited by the producer Sam Shaw to create a set of images for John Cassavetes’ film Husbands.
Brian moved to Oxfordshire in 1970 and set up a studio and gallery in a Methodist chapel, where he could explore new mediums including sculpture, ceramics and furniture.
Among commissions of his work were a set of carved heads used on the site of what is now the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London, and a series of 14 ceramic tile panels for the toilets of the Theatre Chipping Norton. The highly entertaining, colourful cartoons on the tiles were a nod to the 18th-century cartoonist James Gillray, and the Guardian noted that “Chipping Norton must now boast the most attractive theatre lavatories in the country, decorated with a joke on every tile”.
Born in Tooting, south London, to Doris (nee Batch), a factory worker, and Frederick Elliott, a road sweeper, Brian attended the local grammar school, leaving in 1953 aged 15 to work as a gardener at Kew Gardens, where he developed a love of exotic plants.
His prodigious output continued in later life with cartoons, books and prints, painting and writing – with a retrospective show at his studio in 2008.
We met in 1960, when I was a student at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and he was studying at Slade. We lived together from then onwards, and married in 2007.
