TRIBUTES have been paid to a Rillington artist who was “kind, gentle, warm-hearted and talented.”

Rosalind Wicks passed away aged 86 on Thursday, May 30.

Born in Leeds in October 1932, her family moved to London during the war years, and she grew up in Surbiton in Surrey. She had an older sister and a younger sister.

A talented artist, she went to study sculpture at Kingston School of Art where she met Colin, who would go on to be her husband for 63 years.

After a few years of moving around in the 1950s, they got married in 1955 and Rosalind did her teaching training in London having turned down a place at the Royal Academy School.

After a spell in nursing, Colin also became a teacher, and when Norton school was built in 1963, he became head of the art department and designed the school badge. He taught there for 27 years.

The young family came up to live in Rillington. Rosalind continued to pursue art, particularly sculpture. It was in 1978 that Rosalind first began to take an interest in postboxes; they would become a key subject in her art and photography, and she also collected them.

She bought some old postboxes and put them in her garden, she had a large collection of postbox money boxes and postcards, and she even joined the Letterbox Study Group, which records and preserves postboxes, as one of its earliest members.

As an artist she created more than 300 painted postcards on a letterbox theme.

Her husband Colin said: “She was very loving and very modest about her work. Her drawings were so simple in their lines and convey everything in their lines. She was very talented. She was a lovely lady.

“She was a kind, gentle, warm-hearted and talented wife, mother and grandmother.”

Rosalind was mother to six children and grandmother to eleven grandchildren.

Her funeral was held at the Malton Friends Meeting House and there was a reception at Rillington with an exhibition of her work. A total of £300 was raised for the Save the Children Fund and Christian Aid.