My uncle David Heathcote, who has died aged 94, was an artist, art historian and teacher.
After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, he taught for a long period in Africa, including in northern Nigeria at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, where he was head of art history.
While in Zaria he began interviewing Hausa craft workers and documenting their work. In the late 1960s and 70s he amassed an important collection, including clothing and embroidered dress (on which he wrote his PhD), as well as leatherwork and crafts, understanding that these skills and techniques were fading.
Most of that collection was acquired by the British Museum – 400 or so objects, now much studied – and in 1976 works were featured in The Art of the Hausa exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London and at The Art of African Textiles at the Barbican in 1995. David’s writings on crafts were widely published and in 1978 he made a short documentary film about Hausa art.
David Heathcote in his studio in 1993 with a plaster study for a bronze, Violin Woman
His own art was profoundly influenced by his time in Africa and he made sculptures in bronze and stone, surreal ad hoc assemblages as well as collage and drawing alongside his main medium of painting. He exhibited at the Museum of Mankind in London in 1989 and in numerous galleries in London, Paris and Nigeria. Canterbury Christ Church University, in Kent, where David taught for many years, has three of his sculptures, and some of his early work is held in the Slade’s collection.
Born in London to Fred and Mabel (nee Deacon), David lived as a small child in the Victoria Street flat of the artist Walter Spindler, for whom his father was carer and secretary. The family moved to Kent and David later attended Faversham grammar school. During the second world war he and his older brother, Graham (my father), watched the Battle of Britain play out in the skies above them.
After the war, David studied at Canterbury College of Art, using a ramshackle chicken shed in the garden of his family’s bungalow as his studio. In 1951, for his national service, he gained a commission in the RAF and then went on to study at the Slade.
This was a notable period when the school was headed by the realist painter William Coldstream, and teachers included Lucian Freud and fellow students Paula Rego and Frank Auerbach; David also attended art history lectures by Ernst Gombrich. Seeing a Picasso at the Tate proved a revelation and he started to paint in a cubist manner.
David then trained as a teacher and taught briefly in east London before moving to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to teach at a public school in 1959. He married Ursula Dittman in 1961 and they had two daughters, Marina and Larissa (known as Heidi). The couple divorced, and in 1967 David met Janet Low. They were married in Bulawayo in 1968 and moved to Nigeria, where Janet also taught at Ahmadu Bello University. In 1971 they had a daughter, Vanessa.
Returning to England in 1979, the family settled in Canterbury, where David became senior lecturer in the department of art and design at what was then Canterbury Christ Church College. He was open, generous, intellectually and artistically curious and a beloved teacher.
In his retirement from 1996 he concentrated mostly on painting – his art was joyful, vivid, vaguely expressionist, occasionally abstract and often dream-like. He sketched, drew or painted every day of his life, right up to his last few weeks.
David is survived by Janet and his three daughters.
