My friend David John, who has died aged 95, was an artist and sculptor who played a notable part in raising the quality of Catholic church furnishings in the postwar decades.
David’s first major commissions were with the Liverpool architect FX (Francis Xavier) Velarde, providing sculpture and furnishings for the shrine church of Our Lady of Lourdes, Blackpool (1955-57), and St Luke, Pinner (1958). Also in 1958, he completed a bronze Madonna for the crypt of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. His last commission (in 2017) was for a set of Stations of the Cross at Our Lady of Lourdes, Wanstead, east London.
Born in Port au Prince, Haiti, David was the son of Basil, a manager for Shell in the West Indies, and Anita (nee Burns). He was sent to school at Hodder Place, Lancashire, but left Britain in 1939 just before the outbreak of the second world war. In Jamaica, he studied drawing with Edna Manley.
On returning to England in 1946, he studied painting in Birmingham under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker, before moving to London in 1948, where he became an apprentice woodcarver to Anton Dupré.
For two years from 1950 he was taught stone cutting and lettering by the sculptor Freda Skinner at Wimbledon School of Art (now Wimbledon College of Arts). There, he met Marianne Hellwig, an artist and poet who had arrived in England in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany; they married in 1952 and moved to Bucklebury, Berkshire, becoming lifelong artistic collaborators.
In 1959 David and Marianne moved to Woodley, Berkshire, to a house able to accommodate their growing family, with a workshop for David and his team of skilled assistants. His ability to work to a brief in a broad range of materials led to high demand – almost 900 commissions over the next 66 years. Whatever the medium, his work was figurative, bold in conception and finely executed. His 2017 stations of the cross, carved by David and painted by Marianne, were produced in his late 80s yet show no diminution in vigour and creativity.
David was a gentle and compassionate man, with a mischievous sense of humour. Active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a supporter of the protests at Greenham Common, he was also an independent parish and district councillor for Woodley and Wokingham in Berkshire. Moving to Stroud in Gloucestershire in 1988, he became active in the local Labour party.
Marianne died in 2018. He is survived by their children, Clare, Helen, Simon, Rachel and Sarah, 12 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Another son, Matthew, died in 2000.
