Obituary: James Gavin Scobie, prize-winning, pioneering artist, working often with metals, leaves a unique portfolio

Gavin Scobie was a pioneer of modern sculpture in Scotland who left a highly individual body of work. It often looks abstract, but it is not really so. Indeed he once said: “I’ve always found it difficult to make abstract sculpture, (or) abstract anything.” In consequence, although his art is sometimes austerely formal, it also usually suggests associations with the human figure, with landscape, or with simple things like books, tables and chairs.

Gavin Scobie did not train as a sculptor. Born in Edinburgh, he went to Leith Academy and thence to Edinburgh College of Art to study graphic design. He took his diploma in 1962 and went on to become director of art at Merchiston Castle School. He was evidently a gifted teacher; he no doubt approached his pupils with the same patience and care that marked everything he did.

He had always had a passion for making things, however, and it was perhaps this that led him to sculpture. He held his first one-man show at the Richard Demarco Gallery in 1972. In the same year he won a competition to design a sculpture for the Invergordon Aluminium Works. This commission (now destroyed) prompted the brave decision to leave teaching to work full-time as a sculptor.

In 1964, Gavin had married Stroma Somerville and in 1973, now with two small children, they moved to Tarvie in Easter Ross, a cottage that he did up himself and made beautiful. There were outbuildings for a studio and gradually the fields round about filled with sculpture.

Winning the Century Aluminium Award that year also provided Gavin with a ton of extruded aluminium and some of the most characteristic works of the early 1970s, for instance Step in the Gabrielle Keiller collection in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, were made in that material.

Another work, Eve, also in the national collection, explores a similar iconography of abstract forms that echo the figure in movement. It is made of Cor-ten steel, however, cut in sweeping lines that, for all the weight of the material, seem as light as free-hand drawing.

Gavin’s father, James Rollo Scobie, was a painter-decorator and a craftsman in the old school. Working with him as a boy, Gavin learned the importance of care and of order in the workshop. His own workshop was always exemplary, as was his craftsmanship. Indeed he was gifted with a remarkable practical intelligence that was backed by a lively curiosity about ways of making things and found expression in the diverse techniques he employed in bronze, aluminium, steel and other metals, in clay, in wood and in glass.

In 1976, Gavin won the commission for a sculpture for the new Eden Court Theatre in Inverness. Made of Cor-ten steel, Eden is a complex form composed from simple elements. Reminiscent at once of Ben Wyvis, the mountain behind Inverness, and of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, it presents a marvellous conjunction of visual ideas to bring Inverness into the 20th century.

There was nevertheless a predictable outcry at such a modern monstrosity. It is satisfactory to record that it is now a listed monument.

In the late 1970s Gavin taught himself the techniques of bronze casting and later also worked with the Beaverbank Foundry in Edinburgh. The works in bronze that followed this initiative were among his most remarkable.

A series of bronze books is particularly notable. The first of his books, Book Berlin, was made in steel, however. Its great hinged pages suggest some mighty text like the lament of Job: “Oh that my words were… graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever.”

Gavin’s work became directly anthropomorphic in a group of massive clay pots that he exhibited at the Talbot Rice Gallery in 1984. Variations on the female form, they were inspired by neolithic sculpture. With them he also exhibited a number of stylised heads and several very beautiful, low-relief masks, also in fired clay.

The move north was a gamble that there would be enough public support to provide a living as there was no real market for sculpture at the time. In the 1970s this was perhaps possible. In the 1980s, it was not. Gavin should have been able to find art school teaching to support him, but, like William Johnstone before him, the establishment did not take kindly to one who had ploughed his own furrow so bravely.

In the end, therefore, the romantic venture of living as a sculptor in the Highlands proved unsustainable and in 1986, the Scobies moved to London. Gavin taught for a number of years at the Byam Shaw School there and maintained a studio where his work continued to evolve.

A six-month residence in the Scottish Arts Council Studio in Amsterdam in 1982 had brought a love affair with the work of Vermeer; it was the Dutch painter’s use of light in a domestic setting that inspired the use of etched glass combined with forms derived from household furniture seen in works exhibited in London in 1994.

The theme of furniture and interior spaces was continued in 2003 in his last major project, the Tyrebagger Circle. Set in a forest near Aberdeen and paying homage to a celebrated stone circle nearby, it consists of three concentric timber circles with, at their centre, a contemplative space that is private, but open to the sky.

It was a cruel blow of fate that Gavin’s sudden death came barely two weeks after he and Stroma had returned north from London to live in a house in Beauly. He had given up his London studio some years earlier and so could only work on a small scale, but in Beauly he was planning to build a studio so he could make large works again.

When I last saw him a few days before his death, he seemed fired with new ambition. We have lost a fine sculptor and a remarkable man.

Gavin Scobie is survived by his wife, Stroma, their two children, Caroline and Justin, and four grandchildren.

DUNCAN MACMILLAN