Rory Young Obituary - Colin Maitland

Rory Young

By contrast with his mother, Rory Young’s career is well documented and his reputation in the fields of architecture, the preservation of ancient buildings, in statuary, in lettering, in the revival of traditional techniques, notably the use of lime mortar as a more sustainable—and better, he would argue—alternative to cement, is established and secure.

However, as a painter, he is hardly known at all. This may seem odd because his only formal academic training, in Cheltenham in 1972 and then at Camberwell, was in painting, under Anthony Eyton, Dick Lee and Ben Levene, among others.

It is hardly surprising that his real interest, architecture in all its guises, from Classical temples to demolition sites and derelict industrial plots, was his subject-matter. He brought the same eye, though, to his depictions of what was around him at home in Cirencester, barns, grain-drying sheds, rusting harrows, familiar fields and cherished trees.

He drew constantly throughout his life. At school, his fellows queued up for portraits, traded for Latin prep, and surely never a day went by without his putting pencil to paper. Given the relative obscurity of his graphic work, it may be assumed that he set little store by his paintings and drawings and saw them only as ancillary to his three-dimensional work, but this would be a mistake. This work displays the same concentration and attention to detail as is found in his more ‘major’ projects.

Rory Young died of cancer in 2023.

By Colin Maitland - Rory’s Cousin