David Gluck

David Gluck, painter: born Pontefract, West Yorkshire 29 October 1939; married 1963 Sally Hallam (died 2006); died London 17 February 2007.

The artist David Gluck's work was informed by a pleasure in the good things in life, but above all by an appreciation of Italy and all that Italian culture, way of life and landscape meant to him. A quintessential Yorkshireman, he had a northerner's urge towards sunshine and the south.

Gluck was born in Pontefract in the West Riding. His great-grandfather was an immigrant German stonemason and both his grandfather and father were picture framers; he was brought up surrounded by paintings, drawings and photographs about to be framed. After leaving the King's Grammar School, Pontefract, at the age of 17 he trained for three years at Wakefield College of Art and then at Leeds College of Art, where he met Sally Hallam, his future wife. In 1962 he went to the Royal College of Art in London to take a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking while Sally, also a painter, studied at the Slade.

After graduation from the RCA Gluck set out on a very full and active career as teacher and artist: he had a strong belief that all teachers in art schools should themselves be practising artists. His first post was at East Ham Technical College; he later taught at Oxford Polytechnic and in Canterbury and Epsom and at Goldsmiths College of Art.

In 1974 he was appointed Head of Printmaking at Central St Martin's College of Art and Design - becoming Director of Studies of the Fine Arts Course. For eight years, from 1985 to 1993, he was also a member of the Printmaking Panel of the British School of Rome. Inevitably he found himself caught up in the turbulent reorganisation of the London art schools during the 1980s, times, he confessed, which sapped the energy of all but the most creative. "The only way to survive the pressure is to paint," he said.

On his retirement in 1994, Gluck left full-time teaching to concentrate on his own work. He was elected a member of the London Group, the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and the Society of Landscape Painters. At Leeds and the RCA he had been primarily interested in printmaking (his prints have a particular mood and delicacy) as well as photography and screen painting. Over the years, however, he came to prefer working in watercolour. "Most artists make a gradual progression," he wrote. "Artists have to find out what they want to do and it's never easy." He named as an influence the random blot technique of Alexander Cozens, the 18th-century watercolourist.

In 1985 Gluck was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society, for whom he was particularly active and supportive, serving as Vice-President between 1999 and 2002. He also conducted courses and demonstrations on the society's behalf but lacked the tact necessary ever to serve as President.

Among the many prizes he won was the House and Garden Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1988 (his winning picture, Spring Sunlight in the Studio, was bought by the film producer David Puttnam). In 2006, his landscape The Evening Sunlight, Petrognano was awarded first prize in the Singer and Friedlander/Sunday Times competition. By then he already knew that he was terminally ill.

Although he held that ability to draw was of the greatest importance, Gluck's pictures were also characterised by a direct, vigorous approach creating a strong sense of atmosphere. He worked when possible in front of the subject in an instinctive, spontaneous manner, occasionally painting as large as 60in by 40in in watercolour. His chosen subject matter was landscape, still-life and interiors.

Year after year David and Sally Gluck returned to the tiny Tuscan village of Petrognano in the hills near Lucca in early May which was "colourful and fresh after long periods of exceptional rain, with an array of flowers everywhere - by roadsides, in gardens, and in the landscape", staying for up to a month at a time. He would start painting at seven in the morning, sketching between five and 10 postcards on the first day of what he called field trips (the cards were later given away to friends or kept for reference).

After these "warm-up sessions" he painted over a period of up to a week, in about one-and-a-half-hour stages at very specific times - working on one painting in the morning, another in the afternoon, in order to catch the shadows, as they fell regularly each day - the great advantage of painting in Italy over England. In 1996 he held a one-man exhibition in London under the title "O Sole Mio".

Gluck's former studio at St Katherine's Dock having been requisitioned when the site was redeveloped, he had his new studio in what should have been the main bedroom of his house in Herne Hill, a house that was kept deliberately slightly neglected - unchanged from the time it had first been bought. A room on the ground floor housed a printing press, while stacked around the house were picture frames: he framed all his own work, continuing the family tradition.

There he and his wife entertained friends for Italian evenings, rigging up lighting and a sound system to serve Italian food and wine to the sound of Verdi and Puccini.

Despite David Gluck's sometimes brusque manner, he was immensely kind-hearted and he and Sally enjoyed a particularly close marriage, supporting one another in recent years as each suffered from cancer.

Simon Fenwick