My stepfather, Michael Cullimore, who has died aged 84, was a watercolour artist who exhibited widely from the 1960s all around the country. Michael’s paintings are in many public collections including those of the Welsh Arts Council, the National Museum of Wales, Salisbury Museum, the Creasy Collection, Salisbury Library, Bournemouth Orchestras, Russell Cotes Art Gallery and Museum and Bournemouth and Devizes Museum.
Born in Bradford on Avon, he was the son of Richard Cullimore, a policeman, and Lavinia Lavington, and was the middle child of three. As a schoolboy in the war he watched Bristol burn from afar during the blitz. The experience of seeing the red night sky coloured his later works.
Michael went to school in Bath and then to Swindon Art College, followed by national service in south Devon as a radar technician. This was an experience that was to have a profound impact on him, and one he spoke of fondly for the rest of his life.
After Goldsmiths School of Art, now Goldsmiths, University of London, he briefly worked in a foundry in north London. At the age of 24, he married Fran Jackson and they moved to her native north Wales, where they bought and renovated a derelict cottage. They had four children, plus pigs, chickens and a small Jersey cow. He painted every day, and after a few years became curator of Bangor University’s museum and art gallery, retiring through ill health 10 years later.
The family moved to Hindon in his native Wiltshire, when he became retained by Austin Desmond Fine Art. After his divorce from Fran, he met and in 1990 married my mother, Henrietta Porter, and they lived together in Wiltshire, Dorset and Devon. They travelled widely together to Europe, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand and Nepal. They had fun, and a long and happy marriage.
Michael loved music, reading and poetry, listening all day to classical music in his studio.
His later life was coloured by the pain of osteoporosis, and despite being registered blind in the last 10 years of his life, he went on drawing and painting. He could never not paint, going to the studio to work every day.
Michael made and kept lifelong friends, was adored by those grandchildren who knew him, sang silly songs and ditties, danced ridiculously and made the most dreadful puns. At parties, when asked what he did, he would always reply that he was a shoe salesman.
He is survived by Henrietta and by three of his four children, five stepchildren, seven grandchildren and 13 step-grandchildren.