The painter David Prentice, who has died aged 77, had an unusual trajectory as an artist. In the 1960s, when he was one of the founders of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, his work was hard-edged, abstract, close to the Op art of a period when young artists and architects were full of ideas for new beginnings. David's art was about new forms, his hero Piet Mondrian.
In the late 1980s, when he returned to full-time painting after a career teaching others, it was to the tradition of English landscape painting. For many years thereafter, his subject was the Malvern Hills, which he knew intimately from countless walks with sketchpad in hand. The forms of the hills were a constant, the weather constantly changing. He painted with the concern for structure and surface that had characterised his earlier work. The watercolours, often done on the spot, were more specific but the paintings done in the studio were as carefully constructed as ever.
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