Ian Potts obituary

My friend Ian Potts, who has died aged 78, was both an accomplished watercolour painter and a brilliant art school lecturer and administrator. From 1963 until he retired in 1995, Ian was the linchpin of the fine art department at Brighton School of Art, where he was responsible for assembling a talented staff team that included Antony Gormley, Dennis Creffield, Brendan Neiland and Madeleine Strindberg.

I first met Ian in 1982 when organising the exhibition Landscape Paintings and Stone Sculpture at Moira Kelly Fine Art in London. Ian had just completed an impressive series of black-and-white ink and watercolour drawings of the stone quarries at Carrara, in Tuscany, Italy, which were included in the exhibition. They remain among his strongest works.