Kay Smith writes:

FRANK POTTINGER, a re­­nowned Scottish sculptor, who has died, was a committed churchgoer.

Frank’s parents were originally from Shetland, where they wor­shipped in Nonconformist churches. For work reasons, they moved to Edinburgh with their three sons, Bill, Jim, and Frank, and daughter, Vera. Sadly, the father, a stonemason, died when Frank was just 14.

Frank began his working life as a mechanical-fitting apprentice in an engineering firm. This laid the foun­dations for skills that he was later to develop alongside his artistic talents. After National Service and through further education, he work­ed on the portfolio that earned him a place at Edinburgh Art Col­lege, from which he graduated with a diploma in sculpture.

He then trained as a teacher at Moray House College of Education, Edinburgh, working in schools in Edinburgh and Fife. Thereafter, he became a lecturer in art at Aberdeen College of Education. In 1985, he returned to Edinburgh, and, based in Leith, was able to work full-time on his own art.

He won many awards and schol­ar­­­­ships, which enabled travel to the Mediterranean, the Baltic States, and the US, during which he broad­ened his technical skills and artistic sens­­ibilities. He was prolific in his cre­­ation of sculptures, cer­amics, lithographs, and prints which incor­porated his sensitive and acute ob­ser­vations of nature, language, music, architecture, and archaeology into skilful manipulations of hard and enduring materials. In the pro­cess, he played a part in the artistic movement in Scottish art known as geometric abstraction. In 1979, he was elected an associate member of the Royal Society of Arts, and, in 1991, he was elevated to full mem­bership.

Frank regularly attended St Giles’s Cathedral, the Church of Scotland parish church for the Old Town, at the top of the Royal Mile. This was not his local church, but he was attracted by its robust congrega­tional singing. Family sing-alongs around the piano at home to the gospel and Evangelical tunes of Moody and Sankey had been an important part of his upbringing.

In the late ’80s, his then third wife, an English-literature lecturer and Jungian psychoanalyst, Norah Smith, introduced him to Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church. He was much drawn to the richness of its liturgy and music and to its dramatic endeavours. In 2008, Frank provided back-up support to a dramatised reading of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, performed in the Edin­burgh Fringe Festival. He sat quietly at the back of the church, taking care of the sound system, while Richard Holloway, in the lead role, attracted the headline in The Sunday Times “Maverick ex bishop to play Thomas à Becket”.

But Frank did not grudge Richard his fame. He had many of his own accolades, including the RSA William J. Macaulay Award and, in 1988, the Sir William Gillies Bequest Award. which enabled travel to ceramic and sculpture workshops in Hungary. In 2004, he had been given the honour of making the coat of arms to mark the royal opening of the new Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood. Following a design by Mark Dennis, Frank created the work from fibreglass. On it, is the motto Nemo Me Impasse Lacessit, which is Scots for “Don’t mess with me”.

In his later years, Frank focused on the less physically de­­mand­ing tech­­niques of print-mak­ing, and, from 1996 onwards, was a regular and popular user of the Edinburgh Printmakers’ facilities in Fountain­bridge.
 

Frank (Francis Vernon Hunter) Pottinger RSA died on 9 August, aged 89.