THE artist Stan Young, who was also a lifelong communist and Morning Star supporter, died recently at the grand old age of 102.

He was born in Hanwell, west London, in 1920 into a large family. His father was a carpenter and joiner, and his mother a seamstress. Leaving school at 14, he worked in various jobs, before becoming a professional artist.
 
The poverty he saw around him as a result of the economic slump and later the outbreak of the Spanish civil war led him to join the Young Communist League aged 16, and then the Communist Party at 18.
 
In 1941, he joined the army serving in the Middle East and in Italy. At the end of the war the army gave him the opportunity to attend the Institute of Art in Florence. There he discovered Renaissance art and it remained a solid influence in his later work.
 
When one of the top brass talked of taking the war onwards to Soviet Russia, this only confirmed his lack of trust in the ruling class. On being demobbed, he used his ex-service grant to attend Ealing College of Art.
 
In the 1950s he earned his bread and butter as a freelance artist producing mainly educational material. With his wife and fellow artist Muriel, they set up their own studio gallery in 1960 and helped establish the Communist Party’s West Middlesex Artists' Group which produced banners and posters for campaigns and demonstrations.
 
In 1956 Young went on a cultural delegation to Czechoslovakia and after visiting the village of Lidice, where in June 1942 German SS troops murdered 192 men, 60 women and 88 children, he painted Lidice, above, inspired by Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s The Third of May 1808.
 
Young became involved in the Artists International and exhibited at a number of their shows. In the 1970s, along with other progressive artists, he also donated paintings to raise money for Vietnam’s struggle against US aggression.
 
His main influences have been very much central European – from Cezanne, Modigliani, Fernand Leger and cubists like Juan Gris and Picasso. After meeting the Italian Communist and painter Renato Guttoso at an exhibition of his work in London, he came under the spell of his strong neo-realist style.
 
Young’s work is steeped in this realist tradition. Starting out with naturalist portraiture, impressionist landscapes and cubist-influenced industrial-dockland vistas to stylised groups of figures, alongside individual portraits and landscapes.
 
He was an accomplished portraitist, completing various commissions of party members, both local and national, including former Daily Worker women’s editor and feminist Mikki Doyle, theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt, former chairman of the William Morris Society Ray Watkinson, and the Afro-American progressive icon Angela Davis.
 
His work is characterised by a strong feeling for colour and formal composition. His colours are invariably ardent – he often uses contrasting or complementary primaries. In that sense his work went against the grain of much British art at the time.
 
A theme which he returned to time and again is groups of musicians in various guises and poses, often multicultural. In a sense these, more than any other of his subjects, encapsulate his philosophy of life – the joy and pleasure of creating together, what we can achieve with a unity of purpose.
 
Although his work has been widely recognised and admired, Young never really achieved the recognition he deserved – probably because he refused to follow trends and fashions and he never courted the critics.

He preferred to stay close to those artists he admired and the ideas which inspired him since his youth. He certainly felt very pleased when he was visited by the Czech ambassador in 2017 who arranged for his painting of the Lidice massacre to be permanently exhibited in the Lidice Memorial museum in the Czech Republic.

Stan is survived by his daughter, Angela Wright, also a painter, and two grandchildren.