My best friend’s father, Alan Cox, who has died aged 79, was a master printer who produced high quality lithographs for a countless number of artists, including John Hoyland, Howard Hodgkin, Stephen Buckley, Jim Dine, Ivor Abrahams and even David Bowie.
From various small print works in east London, Alan forged a formidable reputation as an innovative printmaker, also working with Chloë Cheese, Prunella Clough and Eduardo Paolozzi.
Born in Birmingham, he was the son of Fred Cox, a truck driver, and Gladys (nee Phillips). After Park Hall secondary modern school, in 1961 he moved to London to study printmaking at Central School of Art, where he met fellow student Gabrielle Parker, who became his girlfriend and with whom he had a daughter, Saskia, in 1970. Although he and Gabrielle later split up, he remained close to Saskia, and it was she who cared for him in his final months.
After graduating in 1965, Alan established a lithography workshop, Grafik, in Whitechapel, and then Sky Editions in the pre-gentrified Butler’s Wharf area of Docklands.
In 1979 he moved his workplace to Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, east London, then a rough and rundown neighbourhood, where the only pubs, the Bricklayers and the Barley Mow, closed at weekends. For the next 35 years, often through hardship and struggle, he produced fine prints of the work of many artists, embracing the “social art” of lithography in which, as he said, “you always work together”.
Aside from being a great lithographer, Alan made his own art prints, which were suffused with an energetic sense of colour, surreal humour, and a passion for re-seeing the everyday. He worked with Paula Rego in 1982 on three large lithographs and was one of 10 artists invited to contribute a screenprint to the Royal Academy Schools portfolio Number 1, with the other contributors including Terry Frost, Peter Blake, Bruce McLean, Richard Kirwan and Sandra Blow. He won prizes at the Royal Academy and the Krakow Print Biennale in Poland, and his work is held in the Government Art Collection, the British Council collection, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
He was also a part-time teacher in London at Camberwell and Chelsea art schools, as well as the Royal College of Art, impressing and supporting successive generations of fledgling artists with his generous, no-nonsense approach to the art of printmaking.
In 2013 he retired to Ramsgate in Kent, but continued painting and assembling artworks until the end, finding humour and beauty in the everyday: a disposable cardboard urinal bottle at the local hospital, brought home and painted in geometric blues and yellows, became a work of art.
Alan had an indomitable spirit, and prized his independence. Only in his last months did he allow himself to be cared for by Saskia and close friends; an experience, he confessed to Saskia, that he rather enjoyed.
He is survived by her, two grandsons and his mother.