Trevor Scott: Trevor Scott, who has died aged 58, spent his life immersed in art. He played a major role in the foundation of the Dún Laoghaire School of Art and was one of the most formidable figures in art education over the last 30 years, an inspiring figure to countless graduate artists.
Born in Cork, he studied at the Crawford College of Art before going on to the National College of Art and Design in Dublin where he gained his qualifications in the principles of teaching art.
While studying at the National College of Art in Kildare Street, Dublin he became involved in the beginning of radical student action aimed at reforming the college. During this period he did his teaching practice in the Dún Laoghaire Technical School's Special Art Course.
A nervous, shy man, his impact was in indirect proportion to his shyness. His generosity and availability opened the doors of critical student action to a new generation. This commitment to an active liberal agenda stayed with him for his whole life.
Following work and travels in America, he moved on to lead the development of Dún Laoghaire School of Art. There he joined Eoin Butler and Peter Dowd in teaching a one-year pre-college art course where night classes in painting, wood carving, ceramics and metalwork flourished. From Room 12, behind the church, a concept of a non-academic art education grew into what is today a multi-disciplinary Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
From 1972 to 1980 he headed the art department at the then School of Art in the old bakery, Cumberland Street, Dún Laoghaire. It was there that Scott as vice-principle expanded the range of subjects to painting, design, sculpture, animation, film, photography and ceramics in collaboration with his first wife Hester Levinge Scott.
From 1980 to 1991 he was head of art and photography, and as the college settled into its new status as a third level institution, he took early retirement and the main lecture theatre was renamed the Trevor Scott Theatre in his honour.
Within a year, Scott had begun to develop a programme of action to provide art education to those whose lives are touched by disability.
Art Link was founded and developed. Creating new educational systems in the real world was not easy. That it seems to have been so is a testament to his quiet tenacity and skill in moving bureaucracies forward.
Again he moved on, went for further training as an addiction councillor with Aiseiri in Wexford, qualified and practised. What we got in Trevor Scott was a full life given in service to others, attempting to give help to people, primarily as an educator. We will never know how many people he helped in his different roles. His life always had that radical edge of creative liberalism. He stayed as much as he could out of the limelight and his final choice of career, with its codes of confidentiality, seems so appropriate to his life.
Outside his work in education, Scott designed and painted quietly but rarely exhibited outside group shows in Ireland, Britain, Europe and South America. His work is held in a number of private collections.
In 1990 he worked on and contributed to The Great Book of Ireland. In 1991 he edited Second Sight, the first major collection of contemporary Irish press photography on behalf of the Press Photographers Association of Ireland (PPAI). His remarkable visual intelligence and the ability to make creative lateral connections was the key to the success of the book, both visually and as a piece of modern history.
From 1992 to 1997, he chaired the international judges panel for the annual PPAI awards. As well as acting as guest lecturer at numerous conferences, Scott chaired Dún Laoghaire Arts Week from 1992 to 1995 and initiated two arts-related FÁS programmes.
In 1999 he married Miriam Lambert and their home in Dalkey and Kilkenny reflected their mutual love of art, and Trevor's abiding delight in the work of friends and former students whose gifts were demonstrably treasured, the walls a gallery of paintings, photographs and drawings, their garden a work of art in itself. A member of the Institute of Designers in Ireland, he continued to immerse himself in administration, becoming a member of UNIMA International and together with Miriam, ran the International Puppet Festival from 1991-2000.
By some special magic when he lived in a tiny cottage in Glasthule the ancient keyhole in Trevor Scott's front door acted as a lens, and his miniature hallway as a camera obscura. Thus life reflected itself upside-down on his inside wall, a metaphor for a remarkable, quiet, selfless man who spent his life working for the visual arts in Ireland, while managing himself to remain almost invisible.
Trevor Scott is survived by his wife Miriam, his brother Eric and his sister June.
Trevor Scott: born March 25th, 1945; died July 15th, 2003.