2nd September 2003 - Patrick Procktor - Telegraph Obituary
Patrick Procktor, who died on Friday aged 67, was one of the best-regarded British artists of his generation, as notable for his theatrical qualities and his physical presence as he was for his paintings.
During the 1960s, his reputation was on a par with that of his contemporary David Hockney; though that standing was not maintained, his work and personality remained remarkable throughout his career.
From the moment his first solo exhibition in 1963 sold out before it opened, he managed to dazzle a London art scene already full of striking characters. Even in later, more troubled years, when the tone of his skin began to match the colour of his eyeshadow, his flamboyant behaviour, long body and increasingly cadaverous face retained their magnetism.
Patrick Procktor was born on March 12, 1936 in Dublin, where his father Eric worked as an accountant for an oil company. After his death in 1940, Patrick's mother moved the family back to England, and became housekeeper at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
After prep school in Lancashire, Patrick and his brother were sent to Highgate School. He showed talent at art, a subject taught by Kyffin Williams, but his great passion was for Latin and Greek.
His ambition to study Classics at Cambridge was thwarted, however, because there was only enough money to educate his elder brother. Obliged to leave school at 16 in 1952, he found employment with a building merchant.
National Service proved his salvation when his ability in languages secured him a place in the Royal Navy as a student of Russian. It also gave him the opportunity to develop his theatrical talents and an enthusiasm for Communism.
After leaving the Navy, and vague thoughts about becoming an actor (although at well over 6 ft he was too tall), he started to paint, subsidising his endeavours by working as an interpreter for the British Council. He managed to get a picture of an Icelandic poppy in the Redfern Gallery's summer show and secured a place at the Slade, studying under William Coldstream.
Both academically and socially, Procktor was a great success there. While his clothes and manner were outrageous, though, Procktor's choice of subject-matter and technique was conventional. He was a keen and highly competent watercolourist and travel-painter, at a time when neither was fashionable.
He also became a talented printmaker, and later produced a series of aquatints and etchings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1976). At that first one-man show at the Redfern Gallery in 1963, the year after his graduation, Bryan Robertson, then director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, wrote of "the metaphorical handsprings, somersaults and cartwheels which a young artist performs when he finds himself suddenly".
A year later, Robertson selected him for his New Generation Exhibition, which featured the most promising artists of the time, including Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney and Bridget Riley.
In 1965 two pages were devoted to Procktor in the publication Private View by Robertson and John Russell, with photographs by Lord Snowdon, and he had also become a member of the teaching staff at Camberwell School of Art.
At this time, he became infatuated with a young Oxford graduate called Gervase Griffiths and began to paint him almost exclusively for two years. This did not meet with universal approval. His debut exhibition in New York in 1968 of large acrylics of Griffiths - a "one boy show", as he put it - did not do well. More successful that year was his first watercolour show at the Redfern, mainly portraits, including one of Mick Jagger.
Procktor maintained a keen interest in the performing arts and later designed for the theatre. He flirted with pop music, designing the cover for Elton John's album Blue Moves, and one of his pictures of the Rolling Stones in drag was used for the cover of their single Have You Seen Your Mother Baby? But his abiding interest was Russian ballet.
In 1954, he had been impressed by the Diaghilev exhibition organised by Richard Buckle in London - especially by the use of Mitsouko scent to add to the atmosphere. Buckle, a pall-bearer at Nijinsky's funeral, later became a close friend.
It was through him that Procktor secured a commission to design murals for Expo '67 in Montreal in which he featured Chinese Red Guards, a ballet dancer and the Rolling Stones.
With the proceeds of his first exhibition he had bought, from Coldstream, a flat in Manchester Street, where the walls were hung with paper made to his own design, and crowded with pictures by himself and by friends such as Michael Upton, Hockney and Prunella Clough. One wall was devoted to images of flowers by the likes of R B Kitaj, Cecil Beaton, Mario Dubsky and Frank Auerbach.
Procktor continued to concentrate on portraiture, painting Joe Orton nude (bar his socks), three months before the writer's murder. A re-creation of his studio subsequently featured in the film Prick Up Your Ears, in which Procktor was played by his friend, Derek Jarman.
In the early 1970s he travelled and painted much abroad, particularly in Morocco, which he loved, and in India and Venice. He was often accompanied by Kirsten Benson, who lived in the flat below Procktor's and, with her husband James, had founded Odin's restaurant in Devonshire Street.
After Benson was killed in a car crash in 1966, Peter Langan, another neighbour, took over the business. Procktor introduced it to Francis Bacon, Kitaj, Lucian Freud and Hockney, with whom Langan cannily exchanged paintings for meals. When Langan founded his brasserie with Michael Caine, Procktor painted the mural of Venice in the upstairs room and designed the menu.
Procktor surprised many when he married Kirsten at the Danish church, St Katherine's, Regent's Park, in 1973. But his conversion from homosexuality did not erase camp from his personality: he had at first been keen to join the Roman Catholic church so that the wedding could take place at St James's, Spanish Place, where Nijinsky's body had lain in state.
His autobiography, Self Portrai t (1991), gave an entertaining picture of the 1960s and his celebrated friends and subjects - such as Jill Bennett and Jagger - but was less revealing about his inner life. His other books included One Window in Venice (1974); A Chinese Journey (1980); and illustrations for Paul Theroux's Sailing through China and A Shropshire Lad by Housman.
A catalogue raisonne of his prints was published in 1985. In 1988, his film My Britain was screened by Channel 4, and that year he also designed windows for the Aids Recreation Centre in Fulham.
There was a retrospective tour of his work in 1990, and in 1996 Procktor was pleased to be elected to the Royal Academy, though he disagreed with the way in which it was run, and his behaviour there became increasingly disruptive. Presented with a copy of 1999's Summer Illustrated, he ripped it up. He was frequently asked to leave meetings.
The destruction of his house and almost all its (uninsured) contents in a fire in June 1999 was a loss from which he never completely recovered.
Procktor's wife died in 1984. He is survived by their son.