"Anyone can learn to draw, just as anyone can learn to speak or write. Drawing is a perfectly ordinary way of communicating information." These words, from Drawing: Seeing and Observation (1973), by the artist and writer Ian Simpson, who has died aged 78, exemplified his conviction throughout a long career in art education that drawing and painting are not divine talents given to the few, but can be taught and bring great pleasure to all manner of people.
In 1963 Ian joined the staff at Hornsey College of Art, north London, where he started the department of visual research, with very strong emphasis on drawing. During his time there a BBC producer, planning a series on drawing, sat in on lectures at various art colleges and concluded that Ian would be the ideal presenter for the 10 programmes of Eyeline, broadcast from 1968 until 1969, which resulted in Ian's first book, published in 1968.
In 1972 he was appointed principal of St Martin's School of Art and stayed there until early retirement in 1988, when St Martin's merged with Central School of Art and Design. He was admired for the way he tried to resolve contentious issues; the move towards degrees accredited by the Council for National Academic Awards, whose fine art board he chaired, raised difficult questions about the amount of academic content that an art degree should contain.
Drawing: Seeing and Observation was followed by a second television series, Picture Making (1973-76) and a third, Reading the Signs, in 1978. Ian had one-man shows in Cambridge (1975), Durham (1977), Blandford, Dorset, (1985) and Colchester (1994), and published further educational books, most notably Painter's Progress (1983), with Tom Robb and Fred Cuming.
Many art teachers see retirement as a golden opportunity to get back to full-time painting. Ian did paint for the rest of his life, but education was just as important to him. When Michael Young and Ian Tregarthen Jenkin, who in 1987 co-founded the distance-learning organisation the Open College of the Arts, asked him to help create the college's first student manual in art and design, he responded enthusiastically, and went on to take organisational roles. During his chairmanship of the college's academic committee, big strides were made towards the accreditation of courses, enabling students to start thinking of acquiring qualifications. Ian also wrote A-level material for the National Extension College's home-study courses.
Books (12 in all) and articles, particularly for the Artist magazine, continued to flow. The Challenge of Landscape Painting (1990) vividly combined the paintings of 29 artists, interviews with seven of them and practical advice to the budding painter. Nor did he restrict his interest to the famous. For Ian there was no real distinction between the amateur and the professional, and he particularly delighted in writing about unknown artists. A wonderful volume on the paintings of the businessman Tony Rampton, published in 1995, is a prime example of this work.
Ian was brought up in Sunderland, the son of Herbert, an excellent artist who taught at the Sunderland College of Art, and his wife, Elsie. After Bede grammar school, Ian studied there himself before attending the Royal College of Art in London and launching into a career in 1958 as a freelance artist and illustrator, coupled with lecturing in art colleges. In the same year, he married Joan Charlton, who became an art teacher.
After his first marriage was dissolved, he married the textile artist Birgitta Willcocks in 1982. His boyish vigour and enthusiasm persisted to the end; he often told students about the Japanese artist Hokusai's remark "all I have done before the age of 70 is not worth taking into account" and he always hoped that his own painting would get better and better with time.
Birgitta predeceased him. Ian is survived by two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.
• Ian Simpson, painter, writer and teacher, born 12 November 1933; died 15 December 2011
