My husband, Brian Elliott, who has died aged 85, was an artist whose creativity celebrated the pleasure of seeing and notion, and whose portray radiated an intense enjoyment of and boundless enthusiasm for all times. His work advanced from early Constructivist kinds by means of summary triptychs to massive figurative photographs.
He had entered the Slade Faculty of Positive Artwork in London in 1956, and along with his brother, Michael, subsequently arrange a studio and print room in Kennington, the place he started an intense examine of screenprinting strategies. By 1964 he had had an invite from Ian Jenkins, the Slade secretary, to determine a screenprinting division on the faculty, which led to Brian taking on the publish of lecturer there for the subsequent 5 and a half years. In 1969 the Oxford College Press revealed his ebook Silk-Display Printing.
All through the Nineteen Sixties Brian additionally exhibited work and prints in continental Europe, Canada, the US and Argentina, and staged three one-man reveals in London. His work was acquired by non-public collectors, in addition to establishments such because the V&A, College School London and the schools of Studying, Sussex and York.
In 1969 he participated in an exhibition to advertise Carl Foreman and Dmitri Tiomkin’s movie Mackenna’s Gold, and was subsequently invited by the producer Sam Shaw to create a set of photographs for John Cassavetes’ movie Husbands.
Brian moved to Oxfordshire in 1970 and arrange a studio and gallery in a Methodist chapel, the place he might discover new mediums together with sculpture, ceramics and furnishings.
Amongst commissions of his work had been a set of carved heads used on the positioning of what’s now the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London, and a collection of 14 ceramic tile panels for the bogs of the Theatre Chipping Norton. The extremely entertaining, vibrant cartoons on the tiles had been a nod to the 18th-century cartoonist James Gillray, and the Guardian famous that “Chipping Norton should now boast probably the most engaging theatre bathrooms within the nation, adorned with a joke on each tile”.
Born in Tooting, south London, to Doris (nee Batch), a manufacturing unit employee, and Frederick Elliott, a highway sweeper, Brian attended the native grammar faculty, leaving in 1953 aged 15 to work as a gardener at Kew Gardens, the place he developed a love of unique crops.
His prodigious output continued in later life with cartoons, books and prints, portray and writing – with a retrospective present at his studio in 2008.
We met in 1960, after I was a scholar on the Regent Road Polytechnic in London and he was learning at Slade. We lived collectively from then onwards, and married in 2007.
