My friend the artist Padraig Mac Miadhachain, who has died aged 88, lived most of his life at Swanage on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, and also had a long association with St Ives, Cornwall, where he was a member of the Penwith Society of Arts and maintained a studio for many years.
Paddy travelled widely, throughout the US, South America, Europe, north Africa, the middle east and central Asia. These experiences contributed to a vast mental archive of visual images from which he drew the inspiration for paintings that distilled these memories into simplified and vital expressions of form and colour.
Much of his earlier work drew heavily on the grey-blues of overcast skies, British waters and Purbeck stone, and the black of tarred coastal buildings. In his later work this often gave way to joyful expositions of bright colour, which he playfully credited to his experience of the coloured ice-creams of Buenos Aires. Many of the simplified forms in his work derived from long exposure to the boats, jetties and lighthouses of seaside towns in which he lived and worked.
Son of James McMechen, a bank manager, and his wife, Mary (nee Clements), Paddy later adopted the Irish spelling of his surname. He was born in Downpatrick, County Down, and trained at Belfast College of Art and the National College of Art in Dublin before beginning his exhibiting career in 1951. From the late 1950s, William Scott and the artists of the St Ives school were important influences, causing Paddy to move from his early training in portraiture to abstract landscape painting. St Ives modernism and the town itself were key influences for the remainder of his life.
He won travelling scholarships to Moscow and Poland, and three Laing and Daley-Rowney painting awards during consecutive years in the 90s. After a long exhibiting career that included 17 solo shows in London and exhibitions in Madrid, Dublin, Belfast, Las Palmas, Krakow, Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, Paddy held a retrospective exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery, Dublin, in 1999, and in 2000 was one of three artists included in Fedden’s Choice at Lena Boyle Fine Art – an exhibition of the work of Mary Fedden’s favourite artists.
The National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland hold examples of his work, which can also be found in private collections all around the world. I showed his work at the Belgrave Gallery, St Ives, and we became friends.
Paddy was a charismatic man and an individualist who managed to live by the work he loved.
He is survived by his wife, the artist Jane Mac Miadhachain (nee Hobday), whom he married in Penzance in 1997, and by four children, Jill, Shane, Sasha and James.
