Jack Knox

Born: December 12, 1936;

Died: April 12, 2015.

Jack Knox, who has died aged 78, was a painter of visionary clarity. No one I have known enjoyed the phenomenon of sight more than he; perhaps, the only man who came close was Vadim Yussoff, the great Russian cinematographer. Both men exulted in the pleasure and sheer poetry of vivid perception. Vadim shot film, Jack painted a fair number of the most delightful Scottish paintings of the twentieth century.

Born in Kirkintilloch, Jack studied at Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s - hard and heady days. A scholarship took him to Paris, where he attached himself to the Atelier of Andre Lhotte, a late Cubist who had been a friend of Picasso and Braque. Thus his art was shaped by a combination of Scotland's painterly tradition, by European Modernism, and his own idiosyncratic character, at once intellectual and innocent - at least as innocent as a Glaswegian can be.

I remember Jack being thrilled by Hamish Henderson reading a Burns letter to George Thomson: "Let our national music preserve its native features, they are, I own, frequently wild and irreducible to the more modern rules but on their very eccentricity, perhaps, depend a great deal of their affect." Burns, here, encapsulates something Jack felt strongly about the sources of his own painting, and it is not surprising that Jack was, as a student, a close friend of Alastair Gray. Both men embraced historical traditions they honoured but were equally determined to be contemporary Scottish artists. Jack would remain only marginally political - his art delights in the physical world, his paintings have a joie de vive beyond reason.

He was, from childhood, a natural draughtsman. At GSA he was a brilliant and hardworking student but he found the time to spy (from one of Mackintosh's huge studio windows) a beautiful red-hed passing. This was Margaret Sutherland. She became his wife: a francophile teacher of French - Margaret affirmed Jack's love of France, and wonderfully supported his career as an artist.

During the 1960s, he experimented with aspects of Surrealism, Abstraction, Tachism and Pop Art, but his constant delight in the world before him continually drew him back to the beauties of things as they are. He exulted in light, texture, shape, and colour above all. The pleasure he got from being in a garden, sitting in a cafe, stopping on a stairwell was immense, but he was an artist who rarely, if ever, painted before the motif. He looked, he contemplated, he intensified, he digested, he waited - before re-presenting, and making permanent, the essence of what had given him pleasure in the first place. A Jack Knox painting is never grandiose; most are small or medium sized and exquisite: the products of vivid perception, deep feeling, marvellous facility of hand, and a visionary spirit.

After a spell school-teaching on the Isle of Bute, in 1965 he was appointed a lecturer at Duncan of Jordonstone College of Art, in Dundee; there he worked with Alberto Morrocco, David McClure, Dennis Buchan, and Peter Collins. He was chiefly responsible for the third year students and was soon organising annual study trips to Amsterdam. These trips proved life-changing for numerous students and Jack himself found his mature style by adapting the great Dutch realist tradition to his own time, place and temperament. In a way in inverted Karl Marx's famous dictum about the importance of understanding and changing the world. Jack Knox painted not to change the world but to understand, and enjoy it. During the 1970s, Jack revalidated still-life painting in Scotland.

Waiting for his train on Carnoustie station, he would glimpse the beach that William McTaggart painted, but whereas McTaggart painted wind, wave and weather, dragged across rough canvas, Jack painted a single beach hut: huge, psychodelic, a many-coloured living tableau of delight on board. Whilst teaching at Dundee, he became an RSA, and a trustee of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. In 1981 he was appointed head of painting at Glasgow School of Art, and, quite suddenly, the school experienced a second golden age. Jack was there to see a second generation of Glasgow Boys take the world by storm. He was there to see Glasgow flourish as European City of Culture in 1990. He was there to see the flag of innovation passed to students on the public art course, and the birth of the Conceptualism, subsequently, honoured by the Tate Gallery in London.

As head of painting in Glasgow, Jack had one of Mackintosh's great studios to himself. This encouraged him to adopt a more gestural approach and to work on larger canvasses. But, just as Mackintosh was an architect addicted to the spare, the clear, the joyous, the meaningful; Jack Knox remained true to his own eye, his wish to hymn joy, his instinct to shimmy and surprise. He had something of the Archie Gemmell about him - he was not big but he was fast: he was deft, he could jink and swerve and leave many a good a Dutchman standing at the gate. Some say he was the artist Holland never had.

From their home in Bearsden, Margaret and Jack holidayed, often, on Arran with their children Kyle and Emily. The result was a series of pastel drawings of stunning intensity: blues seas, the measured mile, grouse under gorse bushes, a heron alone on the shore, heather burnings on the mountains, all delivered with the firm rectitude of vision.

Taking, well-earned, early retirement in 1992, he returned in 2004 to the east coast, to Broughty Ferry, by Dundee - to live and paint in an environment that had now become home. He was an artist's artist, a generous and loyal friend, who will be much missed. His pleasure in the world echoes that of the Henri Matisse (a French Northman). How he loved a glass of wine, the sight of bread in a basket, a shaded seat in a sunlit garden. The origin of the word "civilisation" goes back to a Greek word: "to be at ease, to be recumbent". Reclining within sound of Carnoustie Bay, or the Atlantic seen from the Ile de Ré, Jack Knox supped at the cup of life - a truly civilised man. His humanity and his paintings stand noble, and at one, with the best in Scotland's history.

TIMOTHY NEAT