Bryan Illsley, who has died aged 86, challenged categorisation. A largely self-taught painter, sculptor, jeweller, printmaker, potter and poet, he was also the creator of informal and of limited-edition books, the latter in collaboration with the poet Christopher Reid. Illsley wanted above all to be seen as a painter, but to disregard his other activities would do him a grave injustice.
It was in St Ives, Cornwall, where he went in 1963 after a series of temporary jobs in London, that Illsley educated himself along basic design principles, buying a roll of lining paper: “Each evening I painted on it, with Chinese ink and black ink, small squares. One after the other in lines like writing and four or five lines per session.”
In 1964 Illsley started working as a packer and clay mixer at the Leach Pottery. Although Bernard Leach’s functional Standard Ware, produced in multiples, would have been alien to him, Janet Leach, Bernard’s wife, recalled Illsley, in his spare time, beating out slabs of clay and making the first of a long line of assembled and hand-built Dada-esque earthenware sculptures.
The same year, he began working at archaic-looking jewellery, magnificent and hieratic, with Breon O’Casey, son of the playwright Seán O’Casey. In 1968 they went into business together, parting amicably in 1982. Jewellery became a mainstay.
Illsley also started on constructions made from found wood, the best unpainted, followed in 1978 by powerful forged and riveted iron sculptures made of scraps of recycled metal, with a nod in the direction of the Spanish artist Julio González and Yoruba iron staffs. He made his own tools, and his work was always a kind of arte povera, which was partly shaped by true poverty and partly by his desire to transform and animate existing stuff.
Born in Surbiton, Surrey, Bryan was the son of George Illsley, a butcher, and Violet (nee Gould), a cleaner. He went to Shene grammar school, in East Sheen, leaving aged 16 to become an apprentice stonemason along with his elder brother, Leslie (who later founded the successful Troika Pottery).
From 1954 to 1957 he attended evening classes at Kingston School of Art, his only formal training. Posted to Singapore on national service, he had a nervous breakdown, ending up back in hospital in the UK, near Woking. Printmaking was on offer and he realised that to survive and remain sane he would have “to live in art”.
In his first year at St Ives, he married Barbara Walden, then working for a local newspaper, and soon they had two children to support. Barbara took on a variety of jobs, committed to her husband’s creativity both in St Ives and subsequently in Bermondsey, south London, from 1986. The marriage ended in the mid-1990s and for the past 30 years his partner was the jeweller Catherine Mannheim.
From 2000 Illsley worked out of a former butcher’s shop in Stoke Newington, north London, adjacent to the ceramicist Alison Britton. He supplemented his income with odd jobs, as he had done in Cornwall. Discerning dealers – Mary Redgrave at the New Craftsman, St Ives, the Anschel and Parr galleries on the King’s Road, Chelsea, Anthony Stokes’ various galleries, and the gallerist and former director of Contemporary Applied Arts (CAA) Tatjana Marsden, now of Marsden Woo Gallery, kept him afloat.
He was entirely committed to his work but not to his reputation. Stokes recalled visiting Illsley in Cornwall early in his career, amazed to find a mass of work in his damp barn studio at Higher Vorvas, and buying a painting, conscious that selling was of little consequence to the artist.
Meeting Illsley was to encounter the very image of an artist who put his life on the line for his work, at once humorous but with dark eyes haunted by a struggle not “to be a coward”, but rather to “try and fail”.
He certainly did not fail, but his audience was always to be a select one. The art historian John Christian, the couturier Anthony Shaw, and the American collector Patricia Barnes all valued his work, and happily their collections have now passed into the public domain.
Recognition came in bursts. In 1984 the Crafts Council gave him a solo show, Bryan Illsley: Work in Wood, Metal and Paint. This was followed by Souvenirs from St Ives: Works 1978-1986 at CAA (1988). A show of his paintings at Stokes’s Todd Gallery in 1999 and a series of exhibitions held at Marsden Woo, the most recent being in 2016, stand out.
His remarkable austere paintings in which, as Britton put it, “Nothing much is happening in the usual places”, were, aside from Stokes, mostly overlooked by the art world – institutionally he was given most support by the Crafts Council not the Arts Council – but were admired by the critics Mel Gooding and Edward Lucie-Smith.
His work is held in many public collections, including Kettles Yard, Cambridge, the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Some work was not transactional, in the form of books of writing and painting given to friends. Though boxed like deluxe livre d’artiste, the books were lined exercise books, ring bound or with plastic covers, the boxes made of stapled re-used cardboard. Handwritten texts – snatches from the Old Testament, the historian Christopher Hill on Lenin, poems by Emily Dickinson and himself – were interleaved with pages of mostly abstract paintings and drawings. They stand as miniaturised monuments to a distinctive unusual vision.
He is survived by Catherine, his sons, Daniel and Ben, from his marriage, three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
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