My father, David Macfarlane, who has died aged 92, was the consummate artist and educator, utterly committed to his own practice and to sharing his passion for the arts. From 1966 until 1989 he was a lecturer in fine art at Somerset College of Arts and Technology, in Taunton, where his teachings encompassed his interests in avant-garde film, poetry, classical and modern music and literature, interwoven with the history of art.
David’s work was intensely personal and reflected a keenly observed view of the world around him. The early 1960s, when he began his teaching career, was characterised by a radical break with tradition in the visual arts; David invited the conceptual artists Rose Finn-Kelcey, Ian Breakwell and John Hilliard to be visiting lecturers. These radical figures exerted a powerful influence on students such as Richard Deacon and Angela Bulloch.
Davie was born in Bristol, the son of Hector Macfarlane, a salesman, and Hilda (nee Fair), and had a sister, Ruth. He attended Bristol grammar school, and, having completed national service with the RAF, studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol, and at the Slade School of Art, London (1959-61). On leaving he was included in New Contemporaries and secured his first teaching appointment at Derby College of Art.
During the 1970s and early 80s his work was included in various exhibitions, such as Three Figurative Artists (with Marianne Edwards and Maurice Sumray), at the Newlyn Gallery, Penzance, and he had a solo show at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, in 1975. His studio is filled with hundreds of artworks – sketchbooks, autonomous drawings and paintings of varying sizes.
These are a testament to his particular sensitivity to visual stimuli, whether burnt stubble in a steep field or his muse – his second wife, Issy, whom he married in 1999 after the death of his first wife, Bee (my mother). This romance stimulated an intense period of creativity through the 1990s and 2000s, inspired, in particular, by time spent in Cáceres, Spain, musical concerts at St George’s in Bristol, and the landscape around his home in the West Country.
His formidable library includes printed matter from countless exhibitions attended from the late 1950s, as well as volumes on the painters, poets and composers that he studied assiduously. Inside his books he kept a multitude of newspaper cuttings that reflect the fluctuating fates and fortunes of artists over the past 60 years.
My father married Bee (Bridget) Perry, in 1956; she died in 1997. He is survived by Issy and his children, Kesty, Oliver and me.
