My friend Pam Walker was a social worker who later turned her attention to painting.
After starting out at the London borough of Brent in the early 1970s, a decade later Pam went part-time at the London borough of Barnet so that she could pursue her artistic interests. Working mainly in acrylics and collage, she took as her principal subjects urban landscapes undergoing change, although she also focused on the beaches of the south coast of England, where she went walking with her sketchbooks.
Pam, who has died aged 76, won a Metro newspaper award in 2004 for a painting of building work at King’s Cross in London, devoted one exhibition to images of the 2012 London Olympics site under construction, and designed the cover of Jeri Onitskansky’s 2023 volume of poetry, Kayaköy.
The daughter of Kenneth Walker, a businessman, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Main), Pam was born in Pudsey, Yorkshire. Highly imaginative from an early age and keen to attract attention, she once told her fellow pupils at primary school that her father, who was away on business, was serving a prison sentence.
She went as a boarder to Penrhos college in Colwyn Bay, after which she took a sociology degree at the University of Kent, where she specialised in the study of deviancy. She then gained a social work qualification at Bristol University, and her first job was at Westminster magistrates court in London, where she worked in drug rehabilitation.
In 1972 she began her career as a fully fledged social worker for Brent, chiefly as an adoption manager, although she also served for a while as a probation officer. Her enduring fascination with people made her very good at her job, and this carried over into her social life: introduced to people, she would quiz them urgently about their lives with sometimes startling directness.
In the early 80s Pam switched to a part-time social worker post at Barnet in order to take a foundation course in art at St John Cass College in London. In 1991 she gained a degree in fine art and critical studies at St Martin’s College of Art, after which she exhibited at various places in London, including Burgh House in Hampstead and Espacio in Bethnal Green. Her paintings were often highly coloured and sometimes bordered on the abstract. “I attempt to respond to memories and feelings about a place rather than make a more literal transcription,” she said.
Pam sold much of her work, but did not aim to make a living from her art, relying instead on the income from her job with Barnet and then, after retirement in 2015, sitting on an adoption panel.
Among the succession of lodgers at her flat in Kentish Town, north London, was the actor Michael Andrew. In 1994, “after fighting for two years”, she and Michael became a couple, although they did not marry until 2014.
Funny, outspoken and gregarious, Pam was an enthusiastic gardener and a generous supporter of many charities. She is survived by Michael and her brothers, Richard and Tony.
