My grandmother Amelia Hastings, who has died aged 94, was a brilliant artist, sculptor and painter. She was also the coolest of grans, wearing her bright clothes, berets and chunky jewellery.
Amelia was always sketching, making things and laughing, and could do the splits right into her 70s. Her hands were habitually flecked with paint or dirt, either from her garden or from her latest art project, and I appreciated her as someone who understood the world through art in all its forms.
Born in Birmingham to Gertrude (nee Lewthwaite), a housekeeper in a boys’ school before she had children, and Harry Shaw, who worked at the Minworth sewage treatment works, Amelia grew up in Erdington with her siblings, Gilbert, Margery and Dorothy.
She failed her 11-plus exam but her headteacher spotted her artistic talent and she became a pupil in the junior department of Moseley Art School, where the curriculum was influenced by the arts and crafts movement. In 1939 she signed on to an industrial design course at Birmingham School of Art as one of the first two women to study that curriculum.
During the second world war Amelia was seconded to the vehicle manufacturing company Coventry Climax as a technical illustrator, producing drawings for everything from fire engines to army field manuals. There she met the Czech sculptor Karel Vogel, who said to her: “You teach me to draw and I’ll teach you how to sculpt.” She was only 19, but they set up a life-drawing class together at Oswestry school in Shropshire.
In 1945 she moved to Kent to live with Dorothy and to work on several magazines, including as a layout artist on Woman’s Journal and art editor of the Footwear and Leather trade journal. In the course of that work she met the scientist Jeremy Hastings, whom she married in 1948. Despite raising four children she continued to practise her sculpture and illustrations, taking night classes at St Albans School of Art and exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1961.
After separating from Jeremy in 1978 (they divorced in 1983), she went to live in a caravan in the grounds of Champneys health resort in Tring, Hertfordshire, and became the artist in residence there, sculpting bronze busts of various people, including Stéphane Grappelli and Stirling Moss. Later she settled in Bristol, where her son Jonathan – my father – lived, and where I grew up. She continued to be fascinated by dance and theatre, exhibiting at the Bristol Old Vic and working with the Fool Time circus school.
In 1993 she moved to Stroud, Gloucestershire, where she lived for the final part of her life in a cottage and then in a care home.
In 2007, when she was 83, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum put on her last exhibition, a retrospective of her work over 70 years.
She is survived by her four sons, Andrew, Robert, Jonathan and Malcolm, by her five grandchildren, Abbie, Maya, Kate, Emmeline and me, and two great-grandchildren, Herbie and Amelia – the latter named after her.
