My friend the artist and teacher John Dougill, who has died aged 81, was a highly influential force in London art schools for nearly four decades.
He grew up in Liverpool. As a child during the second world war he remembered watching the huge warships on the Mersey and collecting warm pieces of shrapnel after bombing raids on the docks. His mother, Ileene (nee Bridgwater), was a physiotherapist, and his father, Wesley, professor of architecture at Liverpool University, worked on the Abercrombie plan for London after the blitz.
Wesley died in 1944 and John was sent to Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, West Sussex, where he became lead drummer in the school band. He went to West Sussex College of Art from 1950 to 1955, and then did two years’ military service in Germany in the education corps, billeted with another painter, Mick Moon, before returning to postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art in 1957.
As a mature student, he found the painting school rather dogmatic, and began to develop his passion for photography, not then seen as a fine art medium. He incorporated photomontage, strongly influenced by the political work of John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, and subsequently worked in the new territory of photo silkscreen.
On leaving the RCA in 1960, John taught printmaking and life-drawing at the Working Men’s College in Camden, north London. He then moved to St Martin’s School of Art (now Central St Martins), teaching on foundation courses, where as a student I first met him, and in the painting department. Later he also worked with postgraduates at the Royal College of Art. He remained a tutor in all three areas until he retired in 1999.
John combined a quiet but confident presence as a painter and printmaker with his role as a supportive tutor. Well read, obsessed with the connection between life and art, he taught students how to think, speak and create.
An early supporter of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, he joined one of the first CND Aldermaston marches in 1960 and was at the climate change rally in London in September last year. In the early 1970s he was an active member of the Save Covent Garden campaign: his posters against the plan to build a flyover above the piazza included one with the slogan: “If Hitler didn’t destroy Covent Garden, don’t let the GLC.” He also enlisted students from St Martin’s to create a photographic and film archive before the market’s move to Nine Elms, south of the river.
Recent gallery exhibitions included solo shows at Gasworks, south-east London, and Studio 1.1, east London, showing small paintings hung in series or clusters. His paintings are subtle, delicate and light, revealing the relationships between the beauty of the sky, the toxic presence of a vapour trail, and the mesmeric horizon of the polluted sea or city.
He is survived by his wife, Vanessa.
