My friend Harry Brockway, who has died of cancer aged 65, was an artist specialising in wood engraving, sculpture, letter cutting and architectural stone carving.
For many years, he collaborated with me and my team at the Bath workshop of Cliveden Conservation, where his skill and commitment elevated our projects. Our statuary and fountains at Castletown Cox in Kilkenny, Ireland, won the Stone Federation of Great Britain craftsmanship award in 2004; we won the award again, in 2010, for the marble chimney pieces we made for a Quinlan Terry designed house in Regent’s Park, central London.
Born and brought up in Newport, south Wales, he came from a talented family: his mother, Diana (nee Libby), was an art teacher and quilter, his father, John, an Olympic swimmer. Like his father, Harry spent many hours during his teenage years trawling up and down the local baths. But his future lay elsewhere. After school – at Duffryn high school, Newport, and UWC Atlantic college, Llantwit Major – between 1981 and 1984 he studied sculpture at Kingston School of Art, and then at the Royal Academy Schools in London. At Kingston he met Rose Willy, whom he married in 1985.
Further courses in stonemasonry and letter cutting helped secure him a job restoring Wells Cathedral, a key early Gothic building. He later joined the workshop of Mel Morris Jones, with whom he worked on a dozen huge capitals (the decorative tops of columns) for a temple in Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire, and elaborate stone vases and urns for Petworth House in West Sussex.
He was a member of the Society of Wood Engravers from 1984, eventually becoming chair (2011-14); he was a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers from 2007. His wood engraving illustrations were commissioned by large publishing houses such as Penguin, as well as smaller boutique presses. The Folio Society requested his work for dozens of publications, including editions of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1993), Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1997) and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1999).
Harry became self-employed in 1988, shortly before moving to Glastonbury, Somerset, where he and Rose had two daughters, Florence and Elsie. He worked from a workshop at the bottom of his garden, filled with presses for printing his engravings and easels for working on stone slabs. He would chip or carve there each morning, his radio always set to BBC Radio 3, before taking his daily walk up Glastonbury Tor.
During this time, as well as working with me and my team on projects, he designed memorials for the Lettering Arts Trust and taught wood-engraving courses at West Dean College in Sussex for a decade. Harry’s careful precision and attention to detail caught the eye of the Royal Mint who commissioned him to design many commemorative coins. Most recently he collaborated with other artists to design the new set of definitive coins, to mark King Charles’s transition on to coinage.
Harry produced his robust figurative work with great ease. The Stonecarver, a wood engraving self-portrait from 2004, depicts him restoring the 16th-century King’s Fountain at Linlithgow Palace for Historic Scotland. I remember him like this, wrapped up in ear defenders and mask, surrounded by the tools of his trade: an air hammer, a mallet and chisels, a precariously balanced cup of tea.
He continued to work creatively until the end of his life.
Harry is survived by Rose, Florence and Elsie.
