Chosen artist for L2l project

• The Guardian, Friday 16 February 2001 02.27 GMT

The painter Ken Kiff, who has died aged 65, never quite starred on the media's British art stage, but his work has many admirers. To them he was a true painter, ever fresh yet firmly rooted in the best traditions. His work has been shown often, from 1970 onwards in thematic and group shows, and, beginning in 1979, also in solo exhibitions, in London, New York and elsewhere.

In 1992-93, he was the National Gallery's associate artist. As a teacher, there was no mistaking the way he cared for art, and his deep under standing of it. Occasionally, he gave public lectures - thoughtful, unhurried personal comments on his own art and the art of those he especially valued.

Many of us thought of him as an art guru, a very wise man opening up important issues. The abstract painter John McLean introduced us in 1969. At the time, I was writing mostly about abstract art, puzzled by English resistance to it, and eager to draw attention to a remarkable upsurge of outstanding work, especially among English artists. Ken's was wholly and insistently figurative. It was also full of colour, sonorous, sometimes delicate, sometimes tough, but never crude. It was always, in that sense, musical, and indeed he had wide knowledge of classical music of all periods.

His subject-matter struck one as openly poetical - a woman, water, a tree and rocks, a little heap of clothing; a lizard, sand, a small rock, a large geometrical sun-moon of the painter's inventing - with more than a hint of myths and legends. He spoke of poetry out of a deep personal attachment to, among others, Yeats, Frost, Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson. His pictures took some of their resonance from these attachments, and can be utterly enchanting. They can also be deeply disturbing.

When Ken spoke about art, it was about about the aspects people call formalist, those that condition our reading of images. Colour mattered to him especially. The exhibition which ended his time at the National Gallery, a museum dominated by relatively low-toned work, sang with colour. Many of the exhibits were personal reworkings of the gallery's pictures of the 13th and 14th centuries, before elaborate tonal modelling and sfumato [the gradual transition between colours] made colour secondary and ornamental, not an essential structural as well as expressive element.

Also important were the character and disposition of forms, the spaces between them, their firm or broken outlines, the dynamics of rising or sinking forms. These were aspects he was eager to talk about, in his own art or others', from Chinese landscapists to the old masters and moderns, notably Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Miró and Pollock. He had a special passion for Chagall, finding in him a venturing, partly playful spirit akin to his own, but Klee was the essential precursor, not only for the delicacy and economy of his working methods but also for Klee's guiding principle, the genetic process by which images arise out of the marks made and the materials being used.

Not that Ken's work ever looks like Klee's, or Chagall's, or anyone else's. Often his images are benign and cheerful, but at times they were grim, even ghastly. Generally his work was dream-like, neither a description of reality nor accounts of dreams and daydreams, but drawing on both as raw materials. He had no doubt that art should be beautiful, but that did not mean pretty or polite. Art lovers have sometimes been offended by the cruel or coarse actions he included, up-front and without apology. More often his compositions, large and small, from commanding triptychs down to enticing little prints and monoprints, involve a little man (himself?), radiantly beautiful women, elements of landscape (trees, hills, caves, rivers, a boat) or of towns (streets, houses, a pillar-box), but also fairy-tale ogres, truncated bodies and floating heads. Everything has the presence of intense imaginings, and lives on the surface of his pictures as being of now, this minute. The life of colour and form concerned him above all else once a painting was started, and many a work changed both as to cast and script. His pictures end up looking spontaneous, off-hand even. He was always reluctant to say a work was finished, needing to reconsider this or that aspect of it. He was also reluctant to talk about its specific meaning, and not keen to have us speculate about it.

His origins were simple: he was born in Essex, and his father had worked in a woodyard being killed in the first months of the war. One of his two step-fathers appears in an emblematic portrait - a sad, silent image. He did not speak of his mother; a brother died in 1998 after a grave illness. Ken studied at Hornsey School of Art, pottery first, then stained glass under an inspiring teacher, and thence moved on into painting. He married a fellow artist, Jane, later to become a psycho-therapist, when they were still quite young; their children, Anna and Sam, were tremendously important to him.

Many of Ken's pictures suggest journeys or adventures, with himself as protagonist. In 1970, he embarked on a series of small pictures on paper as a parallel activity to his painting on canvas and on boards. He called this project The Sequence. Its nearly 200 numbered pictures relate to himself more openly, in many instances picturing him in various actual and imagined situations, sometimes in an almost illustrational manner, often allegorically. Its essential subject is the harmonies and discords, marvels as well as dismays, occasioned by the interaction of outer reality and the realities of thought and memory. Quentin Blake has included a Kiff in his Tell Me A Picture show at the National Gallery (open until June 17); a selection of Kiff's prints will be at Charleston, near Lewes, from May 13 to June 24.

• Ken Kiff, painter and printmaker, born May 29 1935; died February 15 2001