Simon Lewty obituary

My friend Simon Lewty, who has died aged 80, was an artist who inscribed words and images on layers of tissue paper, creating a richly enigmatic body of work. Typically his paintings depicted surreal city chimneys, mandrake roots and figures that might have escaped from some infernal Punch and Judy show, floating amid arcane symbols and inscriptions of dreams.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, when his works appeared like timeworn maps of hinterlands haunted by ancestral voices, the environmental charity Common Ground invited him to contribute to its nationwide Parish Maps project. At the turn of the millennium, as the figurative and cartographic elements of his work disappeared, rogue letters, runes, flecks and dashes of colour infiltrated great blocks of text.

Simon was born in Sutton Coldfield, in the West Midlands, to Richard Lewty, a dental surgeon, and Marjorie (nee Lobb), who would later become a prolific author of Mills and Boon romances. Top of the class at Warwick school, he confounded his teachers’ predictions that he was destined for Oxford by opting to leave at 16 to enrol at the Mid-Warwickshire School of Art in Leamington Spa.

He then went on to Hornsey Art College in London (1961–64), where he enjoyed conversations with the Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser and with characteristic independence criticised him for his neglect of the Middle Ages. Ranging from medieval graffiti to the Surrealists, Simon’s imaginative cosmos was taking shape, with Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Nash and William Blake among his lodestars. In 1964 he returned to the Mid-Warwickshire to teach art and art history.

Simon’s breakthrough came in the 80s. After resigning his teaching post to devote himself to his art, he was given solo shows at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 1984, and at the Serpentine in London the following year. These caught the eye of critics and soon his work was being acquired by the Arts Council, the British Museum and the V&A, as well as by museums across the Midlands. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery also invited him to select objects from its holdings to exhibit alongside his own paintings. With his reputation established, he was taken on by the art dealer Anne Berthoud and subsequently by Art First.

For much of his adult life Simon lived and worked in the same house in Leamington Spa as his mother, and he cared for her in her last years. He never ventured abroad, but after Marjorie’s death in 2002 he regularly visited Swanage, attracted by memories of the “seaside surrealism” of Nash. Imagery of sea and shore now seeped into his work. A gifted writer, he also enjoyed fruitful collaborations with the poet Peter Larkin.

The British Library’s Sound Archive recorded 50 hours of Simon’s recollections for its Artists’ Lives project. Following a remarkable recovery from a stroke in 2012, he continued to make drawings right up until his death.

His only sibling, Deborah, predeceased him.