Obituary: Brian Holmes, artist and teacher

His largest and perhaps best-known works are the murals at the School of Medicine and at the Thackray Medical Museum, both in Leeds, but the range of his talent provided him with commissions and roles in many fields.

He grew up in Ripponden, West Yorkshire, and after training at Huddersfield School of Art and at The Slade School in London, he taught art in schools in the Midlands for several years.

Between 1965 and 1984, he was lecturer, then senior lecturer, at Leeds College of Education and Leeds Polytechnic. He exhibited widely, both in UK and abroad, usually in the style of the New English Art Club Tradition, of subjects including the Pennines in bad weather, still-lifes and the nude.

He also painted in a “personal style” recognisable in its child-like simplicity. He said that “for an adult to simply copy child art would be pointless. Children do it much better. In my paintings I try to use this elusive quality (of simplicity) as a vehicle for social comment, plus a modicum of humour”.

An early work (1970) in this style, A lady having a baby on television, courted controversy. Having been exhibited in Leeds, councillors in Wakefield banned its display, considering it too shocking.

After retirement from higher education, Brian’s work as a professional artist led to new work on a larger scale. In 1987, he had three paintings commissioned by the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds.

The following year, the Faculty of Medicine at Leeds University commissioned him to paint the history of the medical school. Executed on four panels this large (28 x 7ft) work was hung in public space in the Worsley Medical Building at the University.

This building, which had opened 10 years earlier, paid little regard to the 150-year history of the school, founded in 1831, but his detailed painting, illustrating the buildings, personages and achievements of the school, set against a backdrop of the development of the city, redressed this.

As an admirer of anatomical illustrators, he appears as himself in the first panel of the mural sketching a dissection in the late 1820s at the Leeds School of Anatomy, the forerunner of the medical school.

In 1998 he painted a second historical panorama, this time illustrating the history of the Leeds-based surgical instrument manufacturer, Charles F Thackray Ltd. for the Thackray Medical Museum, Leeds, opened in 1997. In 1999 he painted a mural at the Meeting Point Café, run by the Methodist Church in Harehills, Leeds..

Throughout his life, Brian conducted regular life-drawing classes for Leeds Fine Artists. Brian had three short stories broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and was in frequent demand as a TV extra as a tramp, for which he said he rarely needed to be made-up for the part.

Brian is survived by his wife, Kathy, and Simon, Jane and Sally, his children by his first wife, Christine.