Doug Binder: Influential Bradford artist who deserves more recognition

Born in Bradford in 1941, when he first showed his artistic talents at Wellington Road Primary School, a teacher warned him to be braced for disappointment.

"We had a boy here before you and he used to draw and paint very well," he remembers her saying. "You'll have to be very special if you want to do even better." She was right, her former pupil was David Hockney. In the 1950s art wasn't a career for a lad from a working class family and it might never entered his own head, had he not bumped into an old school friend who mentioned he had applied to art school.

That chance meeting on a bus in Bradford, changed Binder's life. He secured a place at the city's art college and while the course in commercial art wasn't ideal, the work he produced was good enough to see him accepted at the Royal College of Art in London.

As the austerity of post-war Britain made way for the hedonism of the 1960s, Binder found himself at the heart of the capital, rubbing shoulders with the people who were the epitome of cool Britannia long before the phrase had ever been coined.

He knew Paul McCartney, he lived opposite David Bailey and Catherine Deneuve and his bright cartoon-style work soon attracted the attention of the gliteratti, who dubbed him Britain's master of colour.

With his worked feted in the press, Binder, along with his flatmates and fellow artists Dave Vaughan and Dudley Edwards, launched the iconic design company BEV, which turned ordinary pieces of furniture into works of art.

The trio seemed to have the world at their feet, but behind the scenes Binder's life was far from easy. Vaughan, notorious for his often violent mood swings, became increasingly difficult to live with, Binder's girlfriend fell pregnant and while he might have been commercially successful, he was artistically unhappy.

Something needed to change and after some years trying and failing to find the heart and soul of the London art scene, Binder's thoughts once again turned north.

Moving back to Yorkshire, admitting "there was something about the gloom of the north, the depth of colour in the landscape, that suited oils", Binder bought a house in Thornton, returned to painting nudes, which he had last done at college in Bradford and his quiet championing of the northern art scene began.

When Sir Ernest Hall bought the Dean Clough mill buildings, once home to Crossley's Carpets, in the 1980s, it was Binder who he brought in to develop the complex's artistic offerings. He has been there ever since and, as the founding curator he has been the driving force behind the Dean Clough Collection which now boasts 500 works from the likes of Anthony Earnshaw, Jeff Nuttall and Judith Shackleton.

"The real art of our astonishingly creative country is made in all corners of the provinces by individuals who are often strangers to self-promotion and who pursue long, varied and yes, patchy careers in isolation," says art critic David Lee in a foreword to a new book, Full Circle, which celebrates Binder's departure from and return to Bradford, as well as the bit in between.

"They doggedly pursue ambitions whilst humbly accepting the challenge of what they do.

"Doug has never looked back and he has never stropped looking and striving. I don't think one can ask any more of an artist than they live this commitment.

"Sadly, his oeuvre is part of our neglected art history."

Full Circle: The Paintings of Douglas Binder, Dean Clough publications, priced 35 is out now.