TRIBUTES have been paid to the former senior lecturer at Newport School of Art who was widely regarded as one of Wales’s leading contemporary painters.

John Selway died at his Abertillery home on Tuesday – October 31 – after losing his battle with cancer, aged 79.

From a generation of artists including David Hockney and Sir Peter Blake at London’s Royal College of Art, the Blaenau Gwent artist moved away from the burgeoning Pop Art culture of the 1960s.

Instead, he was inspired by an array of influences – notably Wales and the work of Dylan Thomas – through his career.

Although born in Yorkshire in 1938, he moved to Abertillery – the area from where his parents came from - in 1941 and later studied at the Six Bells and Abertillery Technical schools.

He was guided toward a job as a colliery draughtsman before his family allowed him to enrol at the Newport School of Art in 1953.

He would return to Wales in 1964 after studying at the Royal College of Art and became a highly influential tutor and senior lecturer at Newport School of Art, before he retired from teaching in 1991.

In recent years he divided his time between his Abertillery home and the Spanish Sierras, where he painted a great deal.

His art was not just limited to paint, creating sculpture and engravings as well as collaborating with writers.

One of his most striking later works is a 15-piece Stations of the Cross which is on permanent display at St Michael’s Anglican Church in his home town.

Former student and publisher Richard Frame said: “I was very upset to hear that John Selway had passed away, although he'd been very ill for quite some time it still came as a shock.

“I first met John in 1972 in the print room in Newport Art College, he was a tutor there and I was student.

“We kept in touch over the ensuing years.

“As time went by I began to realise what an important Welsh artist he was and that his work was under-appreciated.

“Through my involvement with a Newport publisher - Three Impostors - the opportunity arose to commission and publish a biography written by Jon Gower.

“This will be released in the early part of next year with the H'mm Foundation.

“Our thoughts are with Alison and his family.”