Michael Edmonds, who has died aged 87, was an architect, artist and author whose openness to new experiences made him a gentle radical. In 1944 he was plucked from rural Dorset to labour underground in Wales. What might have proved an ordeal became what he described as his "gold brick in the cellar", informing his social and artistic vision for the rest of his life.
He grew up on a fruit farm at Bere Heath, Wareham, that his father, James, had hacked out of gorse and brambles. He was an only child and his mother, Joanna May Burr, had died giving birth to him. As a small boy he read, painted and ran free over the heath, fascinated by tar-splashed road men, farm labourers, Gypsies and squatters.
After King's school, Bruton, in Somerset, he began his architectural training at the Royal West of England School of Architecture in Bristol in 1943, but tried for second world war service with the air force and army, and finally chose the Bevin boys. As some 36,000 men had been allowed to quit mining for the services, workers were desperately needed to raise coal.
Michael found himself transported into a landscape of tips and terraced houses, receiving training to deal with collapsing roofs and creeping gas, and then working half a mile underground at Bedwas, near Caerphilly. The experience introduced him to contorted landscapes that would resurface often in his paintings.
As his mining service was drawing to an end in 1947, he started a memoir seeking to connect a middle-class English audience with his distant mining valley. It was to be published by Methuen, but after he returned to his studies in 1948 it was put away in a drawer and forgotten.
In 1951 he married Thelma Seager, who came from a Cardiff shipping family. They had three children, Susan, Jane and Christopher, and lived first at Penarth near Cardiff, where Michael worked with the National Coal Board on medical centres and pit-head baths. From 1957 he was in private practice in Kent, then with the inspiring modernist Edward D Mills in London, designing schools, community centres and Methodist chapels. Finally, he moved to the Greater London council until retiring in 1979.
Michael had attended classes at Cardiff college of art in the mid-1940s and he became interested early on in the potential of abstraction. In 1956, with Eric Malthouse and David Tinker, he founded the 56 Group to promote avant-garde art in Wales, and the following year they had an exhibition at the National Museum of Wales. The group became a major force and continues to exhibit six decades later.
In making constructions, Edmonds enjoyed experimenting to combine new materials such as polyester and fibreglass with wood, cast aluminium and stone. In 1959 he created a nine-metre ceramic mural for the research unit studying mining-related pneumoconiosis, or "dust-disease"', at Llandough hospital near Cardiff.
While in London he taught at Croydon college of art and undertook sculptural commissions in Methodist churches. The critic Eric Newton wrote in the Guardian in 1962 of constructions in his solo exhibition at the Drian Gallery, "They lead him to something so undeniably beautiful that the normal vocabulary of the art critic becomes inadequate." In the same year he won a competition judged by Henry Moore to design a National Coal Board safety trophy.
After divorcing in 1981 he moved back to Wales, finally settling with his partner Elizabeth Symondson in the small town of Montgomery. In these later years his medium was watercolour and ink, used with speed and strength to reflect on his continuing preoccupations: industry, nature, geology and his liberal Christian faith. Though he was an unassuming man, his absolute confidence as an artist produced powerful and striking works.
Last May, Michael was overjoyed when his youthful mining memoir was published by the South Wales Record Society as War Underground: Memoirs of a Bevin Boy in the South Wales Coalfield. Illustrated with his vivid later paintings, it communicated movingly across class and generations the stories of mining work in wartime and a young man's passionate embrace of new experience.
He is survived by Elizabeth and his children.
• Michael Edmonds, artist, architect and author, born 9 April 1926; died 30 March 2014
