My father, Patrick Lovely, who has died aged 85, was an artist and art teacher whose paintings and drawings, especially in later life, documented the everyday activities of ordinary people, especially in Brixton, south London, where he lived for many years.
His Brixton work focused particularly on the experience of Irish and Windrush communities there, often depicting scenes inside local drinking holes. He won prizes for those paintings, including at the Spirit of London exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in 1984, allowing him to declare that “my time in pubs was never wasted”.
Patrick was born in Paddington, west London, to Irish parents, Noreen (nee O’Neill), a telephonist, and Thomas, a labourer. He and his brothers, Tommy and Michael, were sent at a young age to be boarders at St Joseph’s Convent school in Burgess Hill, Sussex, from which they twice ran away after being ill-treated by the nuns who taught there.
After returning to London he had a better experience at Camberwell School of Arts Junior Art secondary school (1952-55), which specialised in teaching artistic pursuits alongside normal lessons. He then continued his studies at the painting school of Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1955-59).
He married Bel Foulger, a fellow student, in the year he finished at Camberwell. Soon afterwards, as a conscientious objector to national service, he was compulsorily employed as an animal technician in the vivisection department of the Maudsley hospital in south London. There he was deeply upset by experiments that took place on primates, recording what he saw in a series of paintings and drawings that were exhibited in a solo show at the Piccadilly gallery in London in the early 1960s. Around the same time he also had exhibitions at the Young Contemporaries gallery, the Guggenheim Collection and Morley College.
Over the ensuing years Patrick mostly worked as an art teacher, starting out at Dunraven school in Streatham, south London (1966-72), before a spell as an art instructor at Wandsworth prison (1972-74) and then many years at Clapham Park Partially Sighted school. However, at various times he was also a wrestling instructor and a postman, and for a time ran an antique shop in Brixton, where he once sold a harmonium to Paul McCartney.
He and Bel kept goats, chickens and rabbits in their Brixton garden, socialising with their friends from diverse walks of life, including a host of musicians.
In 1985 they moved to the beautiful Provence village of Seillans in France, where Patrick continued to paint and to document life through his art.
Bel died in 2020. He is survived by their children, James and me, five grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and his brothers.
