Peter Daglish, artist

This week I had the pleasure to meet Peter Daglish and his wife at their home and studio in London.

Peter Daglish was born in Gillingham, Kent in 1930. It was his grandfather William Daglish (1874-1949) who moved from Newcastle upon Tyne to Gillingham in the 1890s, where he married and raised a family. William worked as a coppersmith in the Chatham dockyard. Peter's father, another William (1898-1968) also worked in the same dockyard - and I was interested to find that both Peter's father and grandfather were awarded the Imperial Service Medal in recognition of their services - William senior in 1934 and his son in 1958.

At the age of 25, Peter emigrated to Canada where his interest in painting developed whilst he was working at a hotel in Banff. He received encouragement from artists such as Maxwell Bates (1906-1980), and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal where he studied from 1956 to 1960. He then won a Max Beckman Scholarship to continue his studies at the Brooklyn Museum Arts School in New York.

In 1961 Peter married Marian Brown in Banff and soon after returned to the UK, where he continued his studies at the Slade School in London from 1963 to 1965. This was followed by teaching posts at Ealing College, London and from 1969 to 1971 at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Back in London, Peter taught printmaking at the Slade School and Chelsea School of Art in London from 1973 until his retirement in 1996.

Since his retirement, Peter has continued to be active with exhibitions and workshops around the world - most recently solo exhibitions in Canada and Cuba.

Peter's early works were paintings in oil - but he soon focussed on linocuts and lithographs. Since 1985 he has made fired enamel on steel plate. When we saw him this week he was busy preparing for work to be collected the next day for an exhibition in Bristol, where he has recently been working at the University which has an enamel research department.

Among the many public institutions that own work by Peter are The British Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, Portland Museum of Fine Art and the University of New Mexico.

Peter's other passion is jazz and Cuban music. He plays saxophone and plays regularly with a number of jazz ensembles around London.

In a strange coincidences, we discovered that Peter's son now lives in the small village in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns where I grew up and attended the local primary school, and where my father is buried in the churchyard. It can sometimes be a small world!