Secret timebomb my artist father left when he died

The father I've been estranged from for nearly 20 years died last month, aged 80. It wasn't coronavirus that got him in the end but boring old pneumonia. At least that's what the doctors in the hospital said and who am I to argue with them.

He'd been living in a care home for the last 12 months and – I'm told – absolutely hated it.

This I can imagine. The one thing you need to know about my father is that he liked to get his own way.

He was essentially a bully. He dominated my mother and had her fetching and carrying for him right up until he was admitted to the care home where he lived out his final months following a series of mishaps – such as falling down the stairs and losing his car – that clearly showed he was no longer capable of living independently.

His doctor told us he had Alzheimer's. We knew that anyway. His memory had been on repeat for about 25 years. Being stubborn he refused to acknowledge that his brain wasn't what it was until the day he parked his car near the library and then spent hours trying to find it again.

Eventually he'd managed to phone my mother and got her to drive a round trip of nearly 20 miles to help him find it. It was after this incident that he accepted that he could no longer go out in his car alone and there might be something wrong with him. It also persuaded him to yield power of attorney over his finances and legal affairs to his granddaughter (my niece) and my mother.

The thing about my father though was that he was a brilliant artist and very skilled with his hands.

His exceptional talent as a commercial artist and illustrator meant that he'd effectively retired when he was 35. This was the point in his life when he moved us all to our new house in the middle of the Somerset Levels.

This is where I grew up. My dad had sold his share in a book publishing company to an American company owned by Robert Maxwell (before Maxwell's empire collapsed in debt and ignominy).

My father calculated that if he invested his money carefully and spent wisely, he would have enough money to never have to work again.

Suddenly he had oceans of spare time and being a talented man he spent much of his new-found freedom exploring other creative outlets.

This meant that he developed endless hobbies. One year it would be glass engraving or stamp collecting, another it would be wood carving or marquetry. He started collected model buses, read voraciously, compiled crosswords and drew cartoons.

Without a job to go to he found he had a need to keep himself busy. One other hobby that became more or less consistent in these early years of self-imposed 'idleness' was painting.

As a commercial artist he had been renowned in 1960s and 1970s London advertising circles as a master of tight, detailed drawing. But now being retired he had the freedom to develop his talents as an artist across a broader canvas (if you'll excuse the pun).

He was convinced that he had the ability to gain fame and fortune as a painter in watercolours and oils.

To that end he turned our living room into an artist's studio. He set up an easel and began painting landscapes based on the magnificent views of the Somerset moors that he could see through our windows.

He constantly told anyone who would listen that the green you saw on the levels was a depth and vividness of green you rarely saw anywhere else. As a result his landscapes were characterised by the boldness of their greens – whether it was the green grass on the fields or the green leaves in the trees.

It gave his paintings a distinctive, almost ethereal look but, much to his disappointment, recognition within the art world eluded him. He had a few exhibitions in local art galleries and libraries and managed to sell some of his pictures for sums of money that seemed quite good at the time. But he never had the breakthrough that he felt his talent deserved.

Whenever he spoke about art, he was scathing about the modern generation of artists. He dismissed David Hockney as a man who had made good with the ability of 'an average to middling' commercial artist. A commercial artist friend of his had carved out a lucrative niche for himself painting pictures of aircraft. My father was certain he could do better.

Although he was a man of great creative talent, the one thing my father was not was a salesman.

He looked around at people like Robert Lenckiewicz, and could only see charlatans. Lenckiewicz was an unmistakeable figure who lived on the Barbican in Plymouth. He had long grey hair and a long beard and dressed in cloaks and long boots. He also had a harem of women desperate to be his muse.

I think my father would have liked the harem, but he didn't fancy being in the public eye or the idea of dressing weirdly just to give himself a name. Slowly the painting faded out of the picture. My father became more interested in coaching local athletes.

My sister was a very good cross country runner, and being jealous of the attention she earned I also took up running. My dad soon had a group of young and middle aged athletes who he would train on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. At the weekends there would be races to watch, so slowly his aspiration to become a famous artist took a back seat.

Only recently, however, did we discover how far that early ambition had taken him. Once he'd moved into the care home, my mum decided it was time to move back to 'civilisation' herself as living on the moors was lonely and potentially dangerous for a 79-year-old woman. Accordingly she found a two-bedroom cottage close to Shepton Mallet. Most of my dad's paintings and the detritus from the rest of his hobbies made the trip with her.

Once my father was out of the way in his care home I was able to visit the old house - Nut Tree Farm - one last time before my mother's move.

But it's in the time since my father's death, which has enabled me to go through his possessions, that I have been able to fully appreciate scale of his artistic endeavours in the period from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.

Thrown somewhat carelessly into the loft I came across a treasure trove of my father's more ambitious and creative paintings.

I vaguely remembered some of the pictures as being part of a weird phase he seemed to go through when I was studying for my GCSEs and A-levels. He'd once had an art exhibition which had caused a fuss with the old ladies at the local library and led to some of his paintings being withdrawn.

Now I could see why.

As my mother gingerly held on to the step ladder I was balancing on, I passed down to her painting after painting of what can only be termed as highly experimental filth. It was a worrying window into my father's mind and suggested a much darker personality than I'd previously imagined.

It's not surprising I had not seen any of these pictures before as they must have been painted while I was at school. I think my mother, who was a former model and renowned for her beauty, had posed for a few of them (although all she'd say when I asked her about them was 'I don't really remember, dear').

Some of the pictures are self portraits. In one my father is shown with an arrow through his head. In another he holds an umbrella which doubles up as a woman's breast. The best one, entitled 'Portrait of the Artist as a D.O.M' shows him dangling between two huge bosoms on the end of a chain as if he's a crucifix hanging from a necklace. One of the breasts has a switch instead of a nipple which can be turned from 'hot' to 'cold' to 'orge' and then to 'silence'. I suspect D.O.M stands for 'Dirty Old Man'.

Some of the pictures appear to show aliens. And some are themed around athletics. There's a 'cosmic shot putter' and 'Pheidippides' the marathon runner. Others show a naked woman being crucified on a cross like Jesus or men and women in various states of ecstasy and undress.

Somewhat prophetically there is a painting of a church or cathedral, which could be the Notre Dame in Paris (or equally possibly Wells Cathedral near where we lived). Instead of the religious statues that normally adorn such buildings, he has decorated it with a selection of macabre ghouls and the bones of skeletons. This church has a white tent next to it and - in a surreal touch – real matches are glued to the canvas. It's almost as if he had foreseen the fire that destroyed much of Notre Dame just over a year ago (April 2019). And yet this is not possible because the painting was almost certainly painted in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

The pictures are brilliant but also disturbing.

Confronted with them, my mother seemed to think they are a sign that his Alzheimer's or some degree of mental illness went back further than we thought.I don't agree with her diagnosis. To me they look very much like experiments. As if he was searching inside himself to find a style that would bring him fame, like a latter-day Dali or a modern impressionist.

My father used to say that most of the best artists fail to find fame until after they die. He felt it was because they were ahead of their time and it was only with the benefit of hindsight that an artist's body of work could be truly appreciated. It makes me wonder if, once my father's paintings are exposed to a modern audience, he will eventually achieve the recognition he was so clearly looking for in his lifetime. Perhaps the strangest discovery while I was sorting through his artworks were three pictures of a nude woman I recognised instantly as an athlete he had coached and become very close to in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This woman was a veteran runner who was married with children. My mum had suspected they were having an affair because he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time training her and travelling with her to races all over the south west of England and Wales. The pictures of her posing naked appear to be confirmation that at some point my father was sleeping with her.

I won't name her and can't show the pictures here because for all I know her husband and children are still blissfully unaware of her infidelity. Plus I don't have her permission to publish them.

They were packed separately to the other pictures, presumably because he didn't want my mother or other family members to find them. He must have forgotten about them once he got Alzheimer's. So bizarrely they were sitting in his study like some forgotten timebomb waiting to go off.

My mother when I showed them to her, didn't seem too perturbed. After all she'd had her suspicions he was having an affair at the time, plus she and my father haven't shared a bedroom in many years.

Instead she marvelled at the quality of the brush work and wondered aloud that 'she must have posed a long time for those pictures, I hope she wasn't cold!'

So anyway, here they are. My dad's weird paintings. A testimony maybe to a wasted and unrecognised talent. Looking through them, especially seeing the uncannily accurate self portraits, has brought back memories of the relationship I once had with my father.

At one time we'd been almost inseparable, but after university I moved away and then got married and had children. The estrangement occurred in two phases. The first time we didn't speak for about three years after I'd said the wrong thing while he was grieving for his own parents. A few years later, when I divorced my wife, he decided I was 'no longer [his] son'. And that was it. Although I regularly met my mother away from the family home, I never saw or spoke to him again. I occasionally heard him in the background when I was chatting to my mother on the phone. And usually it brought back memories of the bully who had dominated my childhood and was still dominating my mother's life.

I have mixed feelings about his death. On the one hand I'm happy that the end came swiftly and without undue pain. I'm also pleased that there was no rapprochement as I was able to observe his passing fairly dispassionately. However another part of me will always miss the creative genius, who encouraged me in my studies and running and at the right time could be entertaining and amusing company.

Having stumbled across this secret stash of paintings, with bizarre sexual undertones and suggestions of a tortured soul, I feel a duty to bring them to a wider audience. I'm no art critic, but I sense there is a strong artistic talent at work in them. I think they also open a window on a man with a troubled pysche, who eventually died unfulfilled.

Wouldn't it be ironic if, after his death, I gained him the recognition he was looking for during his lifetime?