My friend Stelios Votsis, who has died aged 83, was representative of the first generation of Cypriot artists who appeared on the national and international art scene soon after Cyprus gained independence from Britain in 1960.
Born in Larnaca, he studied at the city's Pancypriot Commercial school, where his artistic talent was spotted early by the art teacher Victor Ioannides. He began to stage exhibitions while at school, and in 1950 left Cyprus to study in England at St Martins School of Art and the Slade School of Art.
At the Slade, he was taught by William Coldstream, and in his early work Stelios was influenced by the Euston Road School, a group of leftwing realist artists including Coldstream. Although Stelios's paintings from this time were beautifully coloured and richly atmospheric, he destroyed almost all of them. This unwillingness to compromise over what he saw as the quality of his work was a defining feature of Stelios's approach to art. In the second year of his studies at the Slade he won first prize in a university drawing competition. But he refused to accept the prize because he did not believe his work merited it.
Stelios's demands on himself also affected his health. His poor diet and unhealthy living conditions in London resulted in him contracting tuberculosis. Returning to Cyprus in 1963, he helped form an artists group, the Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts. He also represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Cyprus was changing at a pace that was sometimes difficult to cope with. Violence continued between the island's Greek and Turkish populations. As a consequence, images of pain, loneliness and longing, with human figures set in complex geometrical landscapes, became Stelios's hallmarks.
Until the end of his life, he remained a radical and creative artist. In 2005, he and I began a unique series of collaborative paintings. In these we worked together in our own styles on a single canvas, passing the paintings back and forth like jazz musicians responding to each other's riffs. An exhibition of these works was opened by the British art critic Norbert Lynton in Nicosia in 2007 under the title The Anarchists.
He is survived by his wife, Eftihia, and two sons and a daughter.
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