Painter, sculptor and illustrator;
Born December 9, 1921;
Died May 2, 2008.

ALASTAIR Michie, who has died aged 86, was the painter whose skills as a colourist produced powerful abstract works influenced by the natural world. He engaged in the Edinburgh tradition of producing pieces sensuously coloured with bold handling of paint, using matt and scraped paint to suggest wind-blown nature.

He was also greatly inspired by American artists of the 1960s Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, after which he began to produce paintings in what became his signature style - richly coloured and textured, such as The Far Side of the Field (1964). He used black as a colour in the same fashion as the Scottish colourists Peploe, Hunter, Cadell and Fergusson, his background in architecture leading to a canny constructive approach. His work now adorns prominent collections throughout the world, including British Aerospace, Oxford University, the Museums of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo and Mitsui Bank.

Michie was born in St Omer, France, eldest of three sons of Scots parents James Michie, the architect, and the distinguished landscape and interiors painter Anne Redpath. An urbane figure with a dry sense of humour, he was 35 before he felt strong enough to declare that he had gained independence from the painterly sway of his mother. That Anne Redpath had been one of Scotland's most outstanding twentieth-century artists he found a handicap rather than an advantage; indeed, his mother's example did not inspire him to take up the brushes.

Because of his father's work, Michie spent his first 13 years in France, returning with the family to their home in Hawick in 1934, and attending Hawick High School. Hawick was his father's home town, and the place where his Galashiels-born mother had been raised. Architectural studies in Edinburgh were interrupted by the war. A fighter pilot into the RAF, he served with distinction.

Reluctant to return to studies after the war, Michie used his natural talents in draughtsmanship to further a career as illustrator and designer, first in London and then in Wareham, Dorset, a place in which he settled for the rest of his life.

His step into the painterly fold came when in 1962 in Venice he encountered works by the Americans Rothko, Kline and Motherwell, and he found himself enthused by the scale and energy of their abstract expressionism. Some years later, Michie happened upon Mark Rothko in London, and the resulting discussion stimulated him in believing his abilities. Michie's relationship with his mother was close filially, but he tried not to be overshadowed by her. While he developed his own style, it remains a curiosity that she and he both ventured into abstractionism and relied on vibrant palettes in their later careers.

It was little surprise that Michie's design work along with his early architectural training should flower into sculpture. He cast in bronze and aluminium, with his experience of war showing in a bravura mixture of both organic and architectural form. His large bronze Endeavour, commissioned by British Aerospace, bears a thrusting aerodynamic shape redolent of his flying days.

Recognition of his talents followed. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1994, and around the same time, followed his mother in exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and went on two years later to a major solo show at the Mall Gallery in London. In 2000, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bournemouth.

Michie displayed his work in numerous exhibitions and galleries at home and broad. In 1964, he was a finalist in an Arts Council open painting competition, and in 1971, showed at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh. His sculpture was shown at the Barbican in London in 1981, and the following year in Cardiff and Covent Garden, with a major showing in 1993 at the Bruton Street Gallery, again in London. It was his disappointment that, unlike his painter brother David, he never gained the regular patronage of a London gallery.

He married first in 1944 Hazel Greenham by whom he had three daughters; and in 1961 Sally Greasley, with whom he had a son and daughter. He died in his beloved Wareham.