My friend the artist Tim Feasey, who has died suddenly aged 60, made small and intimate but intense paintings, prints and drawings, employing exuberant colour and monotone rendering. He was always reluctant to explain his work, but it combined abstract and representational forms, capturing moments in time and passages of personal history.
In the 1990s Tim was arts co-ordinator at the the Art House in Wakefield, a charitable organisation that brought disabled and able-bodied professional and amateur artists together through exhibitions and public art projects. Tim was very keen to break down barriers between people, promoting integration not segregation in the projects and events he organised and facilitated.
He moved on to become director of visual arts at the Attenborough Arts Centre at the University of Leicester in the 2000s. There he organised and curated a wide variety of exhibitions and events promoting the cultural profile of the university as well as of the city of Leicester.
Tim spent most of his life in the Midlands and north of England. He was born in Leicester, the son of Jeanne (nee Dewdney), a teacher, and Don, a writer and psychotherapist, and went to Morecambe high school. Tim gained a fine art degree in the early 1980s from Humberside College of Higher Education and later undertook an MA in fine art at Nottingham Polytechnic, which was where he and I met. In the course of his studies he twice undertook interviews with the painter Howard Hodgkin, telling me he was most amused by their flirtatious exchanges.
After graduating from Nottingham in 1990, Tim joined the Art House. Running alongside this role, and then his work at the Attenborough Arts Centre, he continued to paint and exhibit his own work. He had solo shows at the Brahm Gallery in Leeds, the Wakefield Art Gallery, and the Atrium Gallery in Derby, Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, and regularly showed at the Wirksworth arts festival.
Tim was uncompromising in how he wanted his work to be viewed. He was keen to enable people to experience it directly and was not a fan of printed reproductions.
He had an unassuming approach to life and art that was in contrast to his naturally gregarious character. His outward confidence masked a fragile and sensitive inner self, the side he channelled so effectively into his art and close friendships.
He is survived by two brothers, Jon and Simon.
