My father, Derek Culley, who has died aged 70, was an abstract artist who was mainly self taught and intuitive in his approach to painting.
His art used the language of abstract expressionism, with echoes of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning and nods to his Celtic and Catholic Irish roots. His 2007 work Golgotha, for example, was inspired by the stations of the cross. His 2016 digital canvas Four Tribes is a homage to Ireland. For many years he subsidised his income by working in computing, but he decided to become a full-time painter after moving to Merseyside in 2004. In 2007, he received a $25,000 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, which enabled him to focus on creating art in his studio.
Derek was born in Dublin to Jack, a horologist, and Doreen, a housewife; he went to St Mary’s primary school in Tallght and then to Pearse College in Crumlin. He left the National College of Art and Design in Dublin after only three weeks, finding that the path of traditional education did not suit his personality, but from the age of 16 he worked in a studio in a garage on the lane behind the family home in Walkinstown, which he rented from the mother of the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella.
Derek met Eilish Doherty, a banker, in O’Donoghues bar in Dublin in 1972, and they married in 1976 in Ealing, west London. In the late 1970s they set up home in Windsor and went on to have five children.
In the 1980s he curated exhibitions for the Windsor Community Art Centre, including one in 1987 by Damien Hirst and Holden Rowan. He was a founding member and chairman of Celtic Vision, a group that celebrated artists from the seven Celtic regions of Europe.
In 1994 he fulfilled an early ambition by completing a master’s in European and business marketing at Brunel University in London. Having been offered a place at Trinity College Dublin in his younger years, which his parents could not afford to support, he saw this as a way to prove to himself that he could still achieve his goals.
Derek used art as a way to step back from the struggles of life and express himself. By platforming emerging artists in his exhibitions and articles – including many he wrote for Art & Museum Magazine between 2017 and 2023 – he helped others to flourish in the art world, too.
He is survived by Eilish, by his children, Adam, Russell, Duncan, Austin and me, by two grandchildren, and his sister, Adele.
