Eric Newton Atkinson.Courtesy of family
Eric Newton Atkinson: Artist. Educator. Communicator. Bon vivant. Born July 23, 1928, in Hartlepool, County Durham, England; died July 14, 2022, in London, Ont., from complications of a stroke; aged 93.
Water was always Eric Newton Atkinson’s muse. He was the great-grandson of a harbourmaster of Hartlepool, England, and liked to claim he was also part Viking. His most glorious paintings feature Hartlepool’s docks and cranes and the Tower Bridge in London – or plumb the depths of the Great Lakes. He painted vigorous abstract landscapes into his 90s and attacked the canvas on the floor of his basement studio from four sides.
Known as Ricky to his friends, he met Muriel Ross at the West Hartlepool College of Art where he studied painting and she became an expert in fabric arts. Muriel remembers their courtship included many letters and phone calls which, in the lean postwar years, were placed to a phone box outside her home in Edinburgh at a prearranged time. He served in the British Army starting in 1948 and, after serving overseas, received an ex-forces grant to study art at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools in London.
In 1956, Eric began teaching at Leeds College of Art in a program inspired by the collaborative teachings of the Bauhaus in Berlin, and respected for graduates such as Henry Moore and Dame Barbara Hepworth. Eric and Muriel’s two children, Brigit and Sean, were born in Leeds.
Because of Leeds’s reputation for excellence, a group of arts educators lured him to London, Ont., in 1969 to become both chair of the Fine Arts Department and dean of the School of Applied Arts and Technology at Fanshawe College.
Muriel describes Eric as both gentle and passionate about all the things he loved. And this energy was brought on backwoods summer camping trips in Canada and Maine.
“All family trips were about painting and education. My father always stopped to read the history signs,” Sean recalled.
Brigit remembers rolling up to the door of a Manhattan hotel en route to a show at the Guggenheim after their tent had been sprayed by a skunk. Their luggage carried an aroma that she called “woodsy.” But Ricky was unfazed thinking only about the fun they were about to have looking at art and seeing Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway.
At Fanshawe, Atkinson recruited talent from the United Kingdom and all over, and grew a range of applied arts programs, including filmmaking, Music Industry Arts, Culinary Arts and Landscape Design. Terry Graff, an art curator in New Brunswick, came to Fanshawe in 1972 after a personal tour with Ricky that included an insightful critique of a carload of his artwork. “He loved the “nowness of now” – the fibreglass forms and electronic music and environmental art and being contemporary and relevant to what was going on in all the arts.”
But his international approach was not everyone’s cup of tea. Atkinson made waves in London’s vibrant, sometimes clannish art scene. Westland Gallery owner Al Stewart remembered it was not smooth sailing. “He had a tough go. But he came with a purpose to bring people in from all over the place in the arts. He was also a skilled educator. Really, he could have been a superstar as an artist but he also chose to educate and share his knowledge.”
Ultimately, the city came to appreciate his vision. “He did not have a big ego. He was motivated by ideas,” Sean said.
“Ricky wanted students to discover their own resources and be independent thinkers,” Muriel said. “He believed there was no one right way and didn’t want students to learn by rote, but to make things.”
Mary Ann Colihan is Ricky’s friend.
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