Norman Ackroyd, etcher who captured the timeless magic of the western fringe of the British Isles
Norman Ackroyd, who has died aged 86, was widely regarded as the finest British etcher of his generation.
He called his medium “painting with acid”, and he was on friendly terms with a vast array of the chemicals, from the violent hydrochloric to the lively nitric, which “bites in all directions”.
Into a bath of his chosen acid, or “mordant”, he would dip a copper plate, masked with an acid-resistant ground, such as wax, varnish or fine clouds of violin-bow resin. The barer the copper, the deeper the acid’s bite, the more ink it would hold, and the darker the tone on the eventual print. Each plate was painstakingly remasked and redipped, perhaps a dozen times, until Ackroyd was content.
The public were enchanted, and his fellow etchers baffled, by the softness he could conjure from his muscular materials (“sometimes you just kiss the plate with acid,” he said), and the extraordinary range of tones in his smoky edge-of-the-world landscapes, of hazy clouds, cliffs veiled in mist and foamy seas.
These were not Coleridgean opiate fantasies but his truthful record of the western fringes of the British Isles, a project called “The Edge of Everything”. It yielded more than 500 views, from Orkney to St Kilda’s to the Aran Islands, off Co Galway, of places that seemed to exist outside time – “not now, not then,” as his friend and collaborator, the poet Douglas Dunn, put it.
“There’s a magic in the idea that you’re seeing a place as the people who came before saw it,” said Ackroyd, “whether it’s monks who built their monasteries on remote islands or the cattlemen who used this drove road for centuries.”
He took to heart what William Blake had said of etching – “the infernal method by corrosives... melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” – and the advice of Yeats about art in general: “God guard me from those thoughts men think/ In the mind alone;/ He that sings a lasting song/ Thinks in a marrow-bone”.
Marrow-bone thinking came easily to this butcher’s son, born on March 26 1938 in industrial south Leeds. It gave him a distinctive way of looking at the world: the chasms on Muckle Roe on Shetland would later remind him of the marks of a butcher’s cleaver.
Less obvious was a career as an artist, which seemed an “outrageous idea” for a boy from his neighbourhood. He began by drawing the surface of the water to pass the time on his brother’s fishing trips in the Yorkshire Dales.
His first encounter with modern art was a Henry Moore sculpture, much derided by the locals. But Ackroyd saw it through a butcher’s eyes: “You’d maybe boil something to make potted meat – and then the hip bone... something would come out,” he recalled thinking. He began to see what Moore was doing with the “perfectly natural, incredibly sensual forms of certain bones of the body... I started to get the point.”
After Cockburn High School he attended Leeds College of Art, and got his first taste of etching, which gave him a “tingle – an intellectual response that’s in the hands as much as the mind”. As the son of a man who worked with his hands, he believed in mastering a craft: “If you’re going to do it, do it well.”
He went down to London aged 23 to study etching under Julian Trevelyan at the Royal College of Art. His fellow Yorkshireman David Hockney was making prints on the next-door table, and they swapped ideas with the industrial design students, including Mary Quant.
Ackroyd dabbled in Pop Art and painting but everything seemed to bring him back to landscape. He was also glad of the restrictions of his chosen discipline, which he found perversely freeing – like an anchorite who confines himself to a cell the better to feel the vastness of the universe. “The greys you can get between the white paper and the blackest black are limitless,” he said.
He liked the magic of creating a sense of three dimensions on flat paper, from a flat press. He liked being confined to smallish works – “it’s got to be concise: there’s no room for waffle” – and being slowed down by the acid baths, which forced him to be precise. He was proud never to have lost an eye or a finger.
He was also proud to work in a democratic medium, and he kept his work correspondingly affordable. He was unsnobbish about engaging with television – appearing on the BBC’s Artists in Print and What Do Artists Do All Day? – and he was a great defender of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, which he first helped to hang in 1989.
In the 1970s he moved to the United States to teach etching in Richmond, Virginia, then Bloomington, Indiana. He was invigorated by the Americans’ willingness to buy art (“they put it on their weekly shopping list,” he said) but one day he woke up and knew he had to come back to the land of his birth, “to be back standing on my own muck”.
His mind was voracious, and his head was filled with verse and music. Unusually for someone with such a pure and monkish dedication to his craft, he did not shut himself away from the world but hungrily courted the ideas of others. On his boat trips to record the Western Isles he would bring poets, historians and archaeologists to help him see things afresh.
On these field trips, his idiosyncratic idea of “perfect” weather was a “day when the sea was so rough it looked as though a million Alka-Seltzers were dissolving in it. The surface was just white froth.”
When he needed to clear his head he would listen to Beethoven’s 17th Piano Sonata (The Tempest). He claimed never to have had any ambition to own a “flash car” but he always coveted a grand piano, and eventually he bought a Steinway, which he kept in his studio in Bermondsey. He compared etching to the music of the piano, and the rainbow of colours that can be coaxed from keys of just black and white.
His works are held by many national institutions including the Tate, the British Museum, the National Gallery, MoMA in New York and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
He was elected a Royal Academician in 1991 and made a senior fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2000. He was appointed CBE in 2007.
He married first, in 1963, Sylvia Buckland, with whom he had two daughters. That marriage was dissolved in 1975, and he married secondly, in 1978, Penelope Hughes-Stanton, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Norman Ackroyd, born March 26 1938, died September 16 2024