Noel Forster

Jan 9 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE paintings of the carpenter’s son were not to everyone’s liking, but the patterns he created through richly coloured arcs and vectors were greatly admired by some, helping him to win first prize at the 1978 John Moores exhibition in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool.

The man himself called his work the “concretisation of light” , involving networks of parallel lines drawn freehand, though he modestly admitted that his painting required more persistence than skill.

Anyway, Noel Forster, brought up and educated in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, became one of Britain’s most acclaimed modern artists, whose offerings gained an international reputation.

Forster began studying fine art at King’s College, Newcastle, in 1950, but broke off for his National Service with the Army in Singapore and Malaysia. On the advice of his tutor, Laurence Gowling, he researched art history for a PhD, riding around the Netherlands on a motorbike to further his understanding of Rembrandt.

Although he completed his BA, Forster abandoned the PhD to concentrate on his own art. By the early 1960s, he was married to Eileen Conlon, with whom he had three sons, and teaching creative photography at the Royal Salford Technical College – moving to London where he taught at colleges, including the Slade, as well as Chelsea and Camberwell schools of art.

He was much admired by students as the ’60s began to swing and, in 1964, staged the first of the exhibitions, which would run for the rest of his life, at the AIA Gallery, London. Two years before his Liverpool triumph, Forster, also a fine musician, had been artist in residence at Balliol College, Oxford.

In the 1980s, he had a studio in the East End of London, where he blocked-out the bottom of windows to stop people peering in, but he could see out from their tops. So Forster gazed through the trees to the sky.

In the words he used to describe his emotions then, you can hear the passion of an artist. “I felt there was a great pathos to the fact that these enormous things were drawn out of plague pits and the victims of the plague. l was reminded of Blake’s childhood vision of a tree filled with angels with their tiny wings bespangling every bough like stars.”

A wise and gentle man, Forster had borne illness with great fortitude.

Noel Forster, artist; born June 15, 1932, died December 7, 2007.