My father, John Eatwell, who has died aged 92, was a serious and lifelong artist. One of his great qualities was being able to galvanise students and others to follow their dreams – and work to make them real.
John was born in Darjeeling and spent his first four years in India. His father, George, was an accountant for Thacker Spink publishers in Calcutta. His mother, Amy (nee Bevan), had studied painting in London and Paris before being sent to India to be a hostess for her father, who had a piano factory in Calcutta.
In 1927 John travelled with his mother, older brother and sister to England. They settled in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, and John attended St Christopher school. He decided at the age of 12 that he wanted to be a painter, and he would play truant to visit the London galleries.
He was politicised by the Spanish civil war; the poet John Cornford, the brother of a school friend, was killed while fighting for the International Brigades. As well as this, his school took in Jewish refugee children – so they were aware of what was happening in Germany.
John had to abandon his schooling at the start of the war when Thacker Spink went bankrupt, but he went on to attend evening classes at Cambridge School of Art. He was called up in 1942 and selected for Sandhurst. He missed D-Day through illness, but soon after went with the Armoured Corps across Europe. His troop was made up mainly of Durham miners, whose courage and the care they showed each other made a lifelong impression on him. He ended up in Bremen, where he was made a town major and helped to run a huge displaced persons camp of 10,000 people, mostly Russians. He was finally demobbed in 1947.
In 1946 he married Celia Palmer. She was the love of his life and she gave up a lot in order to put him and his work first. John studied at Chelsea School of Art, working hard to make up for lost time. Their first child, Matthew, was born in 1949, and I arrived in 1950. John supported the family by teaching part time at the Guildford School of Art and selling his pottery to Heal’s and Peter Jones.
Some time in the 1960s, after an electrifying course with the abstract artist Terry Frost, he abandoned figurative painting and moved into abstract expressionism. John taught at Portsmouth College of Art, later becoming head of foundation design there. He exhibited regularly in London and abroad and also in city galleries such as Portsmouth and Southampton. He was still selling his paintings a few months before he died.
Celia died in 1993 and Matt died in 2011. John is survived by his sister, Susan, me, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
