Simon Lewty obituary

My friend Simon Lewty, who has died aged 80, was an artist who inscribed words and images on layers of tissue paper, creating a richly enigmatic body of work. Typically his paintings depicted surreal city chimneys, mandrake roots and figures that might have escaped from some infernal Punch and Judy show, floating amid arcane symbols and inscriptions of dreams.In the late 1980s and early 90s, when his works appeared like timeworn maps of hinterlands haunted by ancestral voices, the environmental