My husband, Norman Toynton, who has died aged 86, was an artist best known for his work using Masonite pegboard. He wrote of “redeeming” this sensually dead, mass-produced material with lush paint and colour and patterning.
A student at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, along with David Hockney and Allen Jones, Norman was expelled with Jones for rebelling against his conservative professors’ teachings and experimenting with new styles of painting. In 1962, he, Jones and Hockney were reunited in Image in Progress at the Grabowski Gallery, one of the first pop art exhibitions in the UK. Norman moved to North America in 1969, where he had a successful career as a painter and professor before returning to Britain later in life.
Born in Hornsey, north London, Norman was six years old when a German rocket destroyed the flat where he lived with his mother, Maud (nee Wilson); they were saved only by a wardrobe that fell across the bed where they slept. Meanwhile his father, Harry, a draughtsman of naval charts, was on an Arctic convoy bound for Minsk.
Owing to their home being destroyed, the family had to move from lodging to lodging after the second world war, and Norman frequently changed schools. Aged 15, he went to Hornsey College of Art; in his final year he had a painting accepted for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
Following his time at the RCA, Norman showed in Liverpool and Germany and won prizes in Italy and Switzerland, as well as teaching at Cardiff, Leicester and Croydon art colleges.
After hitch-hiking all round the western states of the US and Canada, Norman took a job as chair of the art department at the University of Victoria (1970-72), then as head of the Massachusetts College of Art’s graduate programme in fine art (1973-81).
Emperor, 1988, by Norman Toynton
It was during this time that Norman became fascinated by the possibilities of pegboard as a ground for his work. He had well-received solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1976) and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (1977), as well as at commercial galleries in Boston and Manhattan.
Norman was praised by reviewers in Art in America, ARTnews, the Boston Globe and other publications, and was the subject of a feature article in Artforum. He gave up his tenured professorship and built himself a studio in the Vermont mountains, revelling in the wildness of the landscape.
In 2006, after several extended stays in India, Norman returned to England, settling in Sidestrand, north Norfolk. In 2017 he had his final solo exhibition, at the Dadiani Gallery in Cork Street, London.
Norman’s first marriage, to Ruth Brownstein, a painter, ended in divorce. We married in 1980, and I survive him.