Peter Coombs

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Peter W G Coombs was an English artist living in St Albans, Hertfordshire. He worked in media including pastels and acrylics, and cartoons in various media, and specialist subjects include landscape, steam trains and aircraft. He ran demonstrations of pastel techniques and wrote a book, Painting with Pastels, in the Steb By Step Leisure Arts series, which has also been translated into French.

Coombs' work included commissions for McAlpine Aviation, painting portraits of Jetstream aircraft for presentation to customers. This commission was partly the result of Coombs' having worked on the Jetstream during his earlier time at Handley-Page. He painted a number of book covers for aviation themed books from Goodall Publications.

Other notable work was a series of steam train pictures in acrylic which were reproduced by the Medici Gallery as gift cards; he also exhibited at Medici in London and at Liberty's, where he had several times been commissioned to sit in the shop window painting pastels, as an attraction. He was a regular demonstrator for art suppliers Winsor & Newton.

Coombs was a great cricket fan and built a model cricket ground complete with model figures painted in likeness to current teams and lighting which moves to simulate the movement of the sun during the day. Cricket commentator Brian Johnston visited the model ground and spent some time describing it on Test Match Special, leading to Coombs being invited to present the models of the then English and Australian captains to the players following that year's Ashes series. He has been interviewed on radio and television about his life as an artist. Coombs died on August 9th 2007 after a brief battle with cancer.^[1]

[edit] Publications

• Painting with Pastels, ISBN 0855328991

[edit] References