Colin Dick obituary (Art) stories

When my friend Colin Dick died aged 88, I was part way through cataloguing his prolific output of paintings. This fascinating journey followed on from Richard Yeomans’ critical survey

Colin was born in Cheam, Surrey, the son of Stanley Dick, an administrator for BP, and his wife, Mabel (nee Cant); wartime evacuation of his father’s company took the family to Henley, in Oxfordshire. After the second world war, Colin studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London (now Central Saint Martins), with contemporaries such as Frank Auerbach, Eva Frankfurther, Sheila Fell and Leon Kossoff, and subsequently worked as a scene painter for West End shows. He always maintained that the broad technique required for the theatre loosened his art school practice.

He married Delia Whiston in 1954. The needs of a growing family prompted them to move to the Midlands, where Colin taught art in Coventry and Leamington Spa, but without any diminution in his already prodigious output. He found subjects in traditional landscapes and townscapes, but was also intrigued by the more exotic reaches of society.

The theatre, musicians, circuses, the glitter of funfairs, beggars and Gypsy gatherings had a persistent allure for him. A collection of his work, including watercolour drawings of buildings damaged by wartime bombing or lost in postwar redevelopment, is held by the Herbert Art gallery, in Coventry. He also exhibited all over the UK and in France.

Colin had an easy manner and his expectations of rapport were usually fulfilled. In a Moscow church, for instance, he was once taken for an Orthodox priest and, during an exhibition in Biarritz, France, he was approached by a grandee of the Societé des Amis de Napoleon III with a proposal that he should repatriate the emperor’s remains