Hinge and Furrow
By Stewart Lees

Obituary from The Scotsman, published 7 October 2008

THE artist Stewart Lees described himself as "a landscape painter, essentially". Called up at the end of the Second World War, he trained to be a glider pilot and saw active service in the Army Air Corps. This youthful experience of seeing the land from a dizzying height continued to exhilarate and feed his imagination during the course of his painting career and his most characteristic paintings were his semi-abstract landscapes observed or imagined from far above. When he painted his native Fife, as Lees did again and again, there seemed always to be glimpses of water, distant or close by, and it was especially the distant glimpses that remained as an abiding recollection. He also travelled further afield, his journeys taking him throughout Europe and as far as India and Uzbekistan, for as well as landscapes he loved ruined cities and the sensation of being amidst Middle Eastern architecture. He wrote of how he had found his inspiration for his 1994 picture In the Citadel, Bukhara: "A group of tourists would come by with their guide, and after they left the place would suddenly go quiet, and I felt the wind, the light and the emptiness of the place." Then, late in his career, he became fascinated by the way in which the sea animated a landscape, and he began to find inspiration for his colourful and strongly textured pictures among the cliffs and beaches of the northern coast of France.

Lees was born in the village of Auchertool in Fife and brought up in Buckhaven, where he attended the local high school. His father managed a private railway on the Wemyss estate which took coal down to the port of Methil. In 1947, after his war service, he started at the Edinburgh College of Art, choosing, because of an interest in the relationship of art to architecture, to study in the school of design. His contemporaries included Elizabeth Blackadder and her husband, John Houston, who remained close friends. Among his teachers were Sir William Gillies and Leonard Rosoman, who was working on major commissions for the Festival of Britain and the Scottish Enterprise Exhibition. After graduating from the Edinburgh College of Art in 1952 – where he had won the Alexander Grant travelling and post-graduate scholarships – he was an assistant art teacher at the Waid Academy as well as being a peripatetic art teacher within Fife. Then in 1960 Lees took a post at Nottingham College of Art, eventually becoming head of the foundation course. (The college has become a component part of Nottingham Trent University). He retired in 1984.

Born: 15 January, 1926, in Auchertool, Fife. Died: 1 August 2008, in Edinburgh, aged 82.

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/stewart-lees-artist-and-teacher-1-1136058