by Bryan Illsley, who has died aged 86, challenged categorisation. A self-taught painter, sculptor, jeweler, printmaker, potter and poet, he created an informal and limited edition book, the latter in collaboration with the poet Christopher Reid. Ilsley wanted to be seen as a painter above all else, but ignoring his other activities would do him a great injustice.
It was in St Ives, Cornwall, where he went in 1963 after a series of temporary jobs in London, that Illsley educated himself on the basic principles of design, buying a roll of lined paper: “I painted on it every evening, with ink Chinese and black ink, small squares. One after the other in lines like writing and four or five lines per session.”
In 1964 Illsley began 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, removing slabs of clay and making the first of a long line of assembly and hand-. built Dada-esque earthenware sculptures.
In the same year, he started working on ancient jewellery, magnificent and hierarchical, with Breon O’Casey, son of the playwright Seán O’Casey. In 1968 they went into business together, parting amicably in 1982. Jewelery was their cornerstone.
Illsley also began constructions made of found wood, the best unpainted, followed in 1978 by powerful forged and riveted iron sculptures made from scraps of recycled metal, with a nod towards the Spanish artist Julio González and Yoruba iron staffs. He made his own tools, and his work was always one of a kind arte poverawhich was shaped partly by extreme poverty and partly by his desire to transform and animate things that already existed.
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 with his older brother, Leslie (who later founded the Troika Pottery).
From 1954 to 1957 he attended evening classes at the Kingston School of Art, his only formal training. Posted to Singapore on national service, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and ended up back in hospital in the UK, near Woking. Printmaking was available and he realized that he would have to “live in art” to survive and stay safe.
In his first year at St Ives, he married Barbara Walden, who was then working for a local newspaper, and they soon had two children to support. Barbara took on various jobs, dedicated to her husband’s creativity in St Ives and later in Bermondsey, South London, from 1986. The marriage ended in the mid-1990s and her partner for the last 30 years was the jeweler Catherine Mannheim.
Since 2000 Illsley has worked out of a former butcher’s shop in Stoke Newington, north London, alongside drummer Alison Britton. He added odd jobs to his income, as he did in Cornwall. Discerning dealers – Mary Redgrave at the New Craftsman, St Ives, Anschel and Parr galleries in Kings Road, Chelsea, various Anthony Stokes galleries, and gallerist and former director of Contemporary Applied Arts (CAA) Tatjana Marsden, now at Marsden Gallery Woo, it kept floating.
He was totally committed to his work but not to his reputation. Stokes remembered visiting Illsley in Cornwall early in his career, being surprised to find a mass of work in his damp barn studio at Higher Vorvas, and buying a painting, aware that the impact had been minimal. sale to the artist.
To meet Illsley was to find the very image of an artist who put his life on the line for his work, immediately funny but with dark haunted eyes struggling not to “be a banker”, but to “try and failure”.
He certainly didn’t fail, but his audience was always going to be a select audience. The art historian John Christian, the couturier Anthony Shaw, and the American collector Patricia Barnes have all admired his work, and are now pleased to present their collections to the public.
The recognition came in bursts. In 1984 the Craft 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). There is a show of his paintings at the Todd Stokes Gallery in 1999 and a series of exhibitions held at Marsden Woo, most recently in 2016.
His brilliant and incisive paintings in which, as Britton said, “Not much is happening in the usual places”, apart from Stokes, were largely besieged by the art world – institutionally it was the Crafts Council that gave him the most support and not from the Arts Council. – but were admired by 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 of the transactional work was not in the form of writing and painting books given to friends. Although boxed like deluxe free to the artist, the books were lined exercise books, with rings or plastic covers, the boxes were made from recycled staple cardboard. Handwritten texts – bits from the Old Testament, the historian Christopher Hill on Lenin, poems by Emily Dickinson and himself – were interspersed with pages of mostly abstract paintings and drawings. They stand as miniaturized monuments with a distinctive and unusual vision.
Catherine is survived by his sons, Daniel and Ben, from his marriage, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
• Bryan Laurence Ilsley, artist and maker, born 21 August 1937; he died 29 March 2024
