My sister-in-lawAngela Lemaire, who has died aged 80, was a printmaker, painter, wood engraver and writer. She lived and worked in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders.
Influenced by artists such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Odilon Redon, her main interest lay in developing metaphysical/spiritual themes and ideas, often through combining words and images.
She is probably best known for the handmade books she produced with the Folio Society and the specialist fine art publisher The Old Stile Press, including The Journey of Thomas the Rhymer (2000), The Pyde Pyper (2002), Joys by Thomas Traherne (2004), Secret Commonwealth (2008), A Christmas Sequence (2008), Jubilate Agno (2012) and Talking Through Trees (2016).
She was born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to Derry Lemaire, an army officer, and his wife, Monica (nee Grimble).Her parents had an acrimonious divorce, after which her father remarried and gained custody of Angela and her brother, Michael, emigrating to Australia in 1956. She later wrote about her unhappy childhood in her book Are You Trying To Annoy Me? (1969), under the pseudonym Katherine Blake.
After attending Pymble ladies’ college in Sydney, Australia, Angela returned to the UK in 1962 to live with her mother and stepfather, Douglas Lyne, finishing her schooling at the Lycée Français in London and then Wispers boarding school in West Sussex. She then went to the Chelsea College of Arts in 1963, and from 1964 to 1967 studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, where she specialised in printmaking and gained a diploma in art and design.
At Camberwell she produced and printed her first book, The Plague (1967). After leaving college she worked part-time as a clerk while selling her work and taking on commissions.
For the next few years Angela had part-time jobs as a typist in solicitors’ offices and in art teaching, until in 1973, on a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, she met a salmon fisherman, Roddy Macaskill, and they married in 1973.
Moving to live in Inverinate on the shore of Loch Duich in the Highland region, they had a son, Calum, but separated in 1984 (and divorced in 1987), after which Angela relocated to Edinburgh, working as a cleaner up to 1991 and then as a part-time typist at the Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church until 1999, all the while still producing her artwork. After Calum went to live with Roddy, she moved to Jedbugh and finally became a full-time artist.
Over the years Angela contributed to many group exhibitions and had several solo shows, the last being at the HAGB Gallery in Jedburgh in 2023. Her work is in many private collections, while much of her writing and correspondence is archived in the National Library ofScotland.
She is survived by Calum, her grandchildren, Sorley, Fia and Eda, her brother Michael and her half-sister Jules.