Artist and teacher at Glasgow School of Art

Born: July 7, 1931;

Died: March 14, 2017

PHILIP Reeves, who has died aged 85, was an artist of unusually subtle inventiveness, a master etcher, a painter and a collagist. “Mixed media” fascinated him. He was a great snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, particularly in urban back streets in the West End of Glasgow. These somehow coalesced in his studio into significant, unforgettable works of art.

Showing early promise, he trained at Cheltenham School of Art, and after national service won a scholarship from 1951 to 1954 to the Royal College of Art, London. Professor Robert Austin introduced him there to a traditional kind of etching, against which he later reacted. In 1954 he asked Austin if he should apply for a job advertised at Glasgow School of Art. Austin replied: “I suppose so. It is a good school. But they are all socialists!”

The director of the GSA, Douglas Percy Bliss, appointed Reeves lecturer in graphic design, adding that the only way he could be sacked was if he played around with the female students. Some six years later, though, Bliss did in fact suggest that Reeves leave. It seemed that they did not see eye to eye. Bliss was a competent but old fashioned wood engraver and book illustrator; Reeves, on the other hand, was growing impatient with the conventional treatment of printmaking at the school as an adjunct to the decorative arts departments and wanted his students to be aware of modern printmaking as a fine art rather than a craft. His approach was gradually recognised after Bliss retired.

The dismissive letter Bliss had written to Reeves he proudly, if rather ironically, kept (in an increasingly tattered state), in his jacket pocket, at least until his retirement in 1991. In it Bliss had brusquely said “If I were you I’d clear out.” Reeves did not clear out. Glasgow School of Art suited him. A positive side of Bliss’s directorship was that lecturers were encouraged to do their own work as well as teach. Reeves took advantage of this policy.

His students remembered him as an unintrusive, understanding teacher as well as something of an English eccentric. He pretended to be more of a bumbling character than he actually was. The handlebar moustache and bow tie were one thing. The penny-farthing another. This velocipede, he would explain, required the presence of lampposts in the vicinity so that when its surprisingly little brakes were applied it could be propped up so that it didn’t keel over. Its delicate Victorian construction might be almost a symbol of his art, scrupulously contrived, never overstated, poised between balance and imbalance, slightly risky.

When it was suggested to the artist James Cosgrove that Reeves’ work did not sell like hot cakes in Scotland, Cosgrove did not account for this by blaming either Reeves’ abstraction or his Englishness. He said he felt rather that Reeves was close to American abstract expressionism. “I believe that if Philip worked from a loft in Manhattan his work would be much the same – only bigger – and would sell like hot bagels.”

In fact his work was indelibly his own and the internal cogitation, a kind of slow contemplation that resulted in a surprisingly minimal originality, was unpredictable. If American abstraction was at the back of it, he made it his own. He was an inveterate exhibition-goer, and surely knew modernity in reproductions. His first direct encounter with American modernism was not until 1990; he had ridden his penny-farthing around at the art school to make money for both his students and himself to go to New York - to the land of Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg. As an increasingly abstract artist himself, the scale and visual language of New York art must have been a confirmation and a stimulus.

As his career developed Reeves’ own work appears to have taken precedence over his students’. He continued to make remarkable prints, sometimes using “found objects.” He called these back-street discoveries “rubbish”. His unconventional penchant for inking up and printing corroded and fragmented metal scraps with sharp and broken edges could be quite damaging to printing presses.

The equipment provided for art school printmakers was no longer available once their student days were over, and for this reason Reeves was not alone as a supporter of print studios. To this end he was one of the founder members of the Edinburgh Print Workshop (from 1967) and of the Glasgow Print Studio (from 1972). However, he also worked unabated in his own studio producing a stream of large and small works and his experimental printmaking was not his sole work. Increasingly “mixed media” would describe his art.

His imaginative transformation of often very unexceptional materials – corrugated cardboard for example with its own self-colour and unexpected scale – produced strong images. He did not like being described as a landscapist, even if “landscape” was often central to his art. He was just as much a cityscapist, inspired by high rises no less that rural hills. But the abstract for its own sake often predominated. He was not an artist with a single motif endlessly explored and exploited. Every work had some stimulatingly fresh element.

Philip Reeves is survived by his daughter Paula Walker, and grandchildren Murray and Isla.

CHRISTOPHER ANDREAE