by The end of the painting day for my husband Eric Rimmington, who has died aged 98, was signaled by the descent from his first floor studio to our ground floor scullery.
There he washed his brushes with olive oil soap, which was available in yellow blocks embossed with “Marseille” and – like many objects he encountered in everyday life – could also serve as a motif in one of his paintings.
Born in Portsmouth to Charlie Rimmington, a marine engineer, and Mabel (née Bowman), a seamstress, Eric attended the Southern Secondary School for Boys and then the Southern Art College. His studies focused on looking and drawing, but were interrupted in 1944 by his enlistment in World War II and service in the Far East. On his return he completed the course and then took a Diploma in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1952.
He had married Margaret MacVey, a secretary, in 1947 and now took up a teaching post at Scarborough College of Art (1952–58) with a young daughter, Clare. Over the next 30 years he taught at Bradford College of Art (1958–66), at Birmingham College of Art and Design as a lecturer (1966–69) and at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, where he was principal lecturer and senior course lecturer in painting (1969 -82). During these decades he continued to pursue his own art.
We met in Wolverhampton, where I was teaching art history, and after his separation from Margaret we settled in together. We spent a year in the USA, Eric taught at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Eric felt an atmosphere that was refreshingly free of the prescriptive attitudes that prevailed in the British art world.
Back in England, based first in Worcester and finally in Hackney, east London, Eric felt able, through long and close observation, to return to work. “A selection of objects placed on a shelf within reach of the hand” became the setting through which he sought to explore the world. He was recognized by critics such as William Packer as “one of our most outstanding exponents of the still life.”
He was also a notable draftsman, working with pencil and graphite. The summer was spent away from the studio depicting the abandoned freight tracks at King’s Cross. the filter beds at Haringey; Hackney’s Dalston area and the North London railway line at Mildmay.
From the early 1980s he exhibited regularly, first at the Mercury Gallery, Cork Street, then at the Bohun Gallery, Henley-on-Thames, and the Millinery Works in Islington. Over the course of three decades he has had more than 30 solo and numerous group exhibitions. His works have been acquired by various private and public collections including the Bradford City Art Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and the Gulbenkian Foundation.
We got married in 1994. Eric is survived by me, Clare and three grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
