Remembering Norman Ackroyd CBE RA … 1938-2024

By alan frost on September 30, 2024

I was very saddened to hear that the wonderful and well renowned artist and printmaker Norman Ackroyd had passed away at the age of 86 on the 16th September 2024. His beautiful and atmospheric aquatint etchings are in art collections around the world.

I first discovered his works of art many years ago and had the good fortune to both meet him and listen to a talk he gave on printmaking at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester back in January 2019. It was a most inspiring evening as he spoke about not only his approach to his art, but also the many places he loves and had visited around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland. In particular he told the audience about the west coast of Scotland, including some of the most remote islands including St Kilda, the Treshnish Isles, and Muckle Flugga, which is often named as the most northern tip of the British Isles on Shetland in Scotland, to name but a few.

Some years before that evening I had purchased a very fine book of his work titled ‘A Line in the Water’. The book also included some evocative poems by Douglas Dunn OBE. On the inside of the dust jacket it reads and I quote –

‘In his almost obsessive exploration of the farthest reaches of the British Isles, Norman Ackroyd captures the meeting of land and sea in atmospheric aquatint. His work and Dunn’s complement each other in a memorable fusion of word and image that attests to the power of the place and reflects the extraordinary diversity of Britain’s littoral margins.’

On meeting him after the talk he very kindly agreed to sign this book for me. It was an evening I shall never forget and a book I will never part with.

I love Ackroyd’s work. His unequaled technique and the places he depicts are everything I could ask from a landscape artist. He has inspired me in my own photographic work and whilst I doubt I will ever visit the far flung places he has been to, I feel that through his art he has taken me there emotionally and for that I shall always be grateful.

There have been many fine obituaries in the press over the past couple of weeks, so I do not intend to repeat what you can read online but I have included some videos below which you may care to watch.

The first two are from the series – ‘What do artists do all day?’ which were first broadcast in 2013. The third video is a talk when in the space of several minutes he recites the names of the places he has etched and painted in over four decades. Inspirational.

And finally I have included one of my own photographs looking east down Loch Sunart in Scotland, captured when sailing on the ferry from Tobermory on the Isle of Mull to Kilchoan on the Ardnamurchan peninsular in October 2022.