My friend Birtley Aris, who has died aged 93, was an artist who produced compellingly atmospheric images of landscapes, architecture and railways, usually in pen and often in response to poetry.
Among his most arresting works were a series of large-scale drawings suggested by the poems of Edward Thomas (1985), his watercolours of Durham Cathedral and Hexham Abbey (1990 and 1992), and Storyville (2002), a celebration of jazz and one of several collaborations with the poet Linda France. He stood in the romantic tradition of Samuel Palmer and John Piper, but his work was distinctively his own: a windswept, snowy, beguiling vision of industrial-pastoral England.
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