"Colin Lanceley was an artist of rare integrity who pursued his own ideals of beauty in an artworld that made a fetish of ugliness. He was a thinker, and a wonderfully articulate speaker who could address a large audience with the ease of a dinner party conversation. He was a dedicated advocate for causes such as the revival of the National Art School.

I used to see Lanceley with great regularity but have hardly laid eyes on him over the past few years. A chronic heart condition kept him at home and wore him away by degrees.

It’s sad to think of him so diminished by illness, because few Australian artists have been more passionately opposed to the doom and gloom, and false seriousness that characterises so much contemporary art. Lanceley’s mentors were artists such as Matisse and Mirò – the former for his courageous use of colour, the latter for his playfulness. These were qualities found in Lanceley’s own work, which attracted most attention in the years before he left for London in 1965, and shortly after his return to Sydney in the early 1980s. A picture such as Songs of a Summer Night (Lynne’s Garden) (1985), in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW, has a freshness that seems to renew itself from one decade to the next.

There are artists who sell a picture and immediately hasten to make another dozen of the same type. Lanceley took the opposite approach: a sale meant he could spend much longer on the next work, refining his colours and forms; rearranging the three-dimensional objects he attached to the picture plane. If his early creations with the Annandale Imitation Realists were anarchic, his later pieces were almost classical. One could say he began as a Dionysian and ended as an Apollonian. Lanceley saw modern painting and poetry as closely aligned, and found constant inspiration in writers such as T.S.Eliot.

Hailed as a prodigy in the 1960s, Lanceley became marginalised in the final years of his career. His constructed paintings were essentially celebrations of life, and this was anathema to the highly politicised avant-garde of the 1990s. Lanceley may have been disappointed but never deterred, as he was making art for all time, not for a season. Those works will ensure a permanent place in the annals of modern Australian art."

Although Colin Lanceley withdrew from the art scene suffering from declining health and a growing sense of disenchantment, his work was one long chorus of joie de vivre. To look at his paintings from any period is to see an artist who believed, with Matisse, that art should be a celebration of life and beauty. In Lanceley's case, a taste for vibrant colour was allied to the most painstaking composition. His best pieces are notable for their lyricism and visual intelligence.

He was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, on January 6, 1938. His father, John Lassegue Lanceley was of French-English stock, while his mother, Mary Ann (nee Ayers), came from New Zealand and Scottish parentage.

In 1939 the family moved to Sydney and John worked for the RAAF throughout World War II. Lanceley was undistinguished at school, but developed an interest in art and literature. At 16 he was apprenticed to a photo-engraving company, and enrolled in night-time art classes at North Sydney Technical College.

By 1956, against John's wishes, Lanceley was studying art full-time at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School). The tech was the Mecca for art education in those days, the dominant personality being John Passmore, who preached the gospel according to Cezanne. Many former students recall these lessons fondly, but Lanceley was bored by Passmore's obsessions, being more interested in artists such as Braque and Picasso, who built on Cezanne's legacy.

His favourite teachers were Godfrey Miller, whose own work was heavily influenced by cubism and anthroposophy, and the Viennese emigre, John Kaplan, who ran the school library.

Lanceley's breakthrough did not arrive at college, but in Magda's coffee shop in Taylor Square, where he met two other aspiring artists, Mike Brown and Ross Crothall. The three friends moved into a house in Annandale that quickly became an Aladdin's Cave. Art critic Robert Hughes was an earlier visitor and has left a vivid description of "a palace of incrustations, a colonial Merzbau jammed with icons and effigies made from junk, a cave of drongo-droppings, as though the accumulated contents of lower-middle-class Australian life in all its kitsch, pathos and grinding insistent force had been dumped onto the walls and then provisionally stabilised with splots and gouts of paint."

The Annandale Imitation Realists were Australia's closest approach to the anarchy and iconoclasm of the Dadaists, but their moment was brief, the highlight being a riotous 1962 survey show at John Reed's Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne. By 1963 the group had dissolved, as Brown pursued an overtly political stance, and Lanceley became preoccupied with aesthetics.

When Lanceley appeared in a famous group photo of artists standing on the balcony of the Hungry Horse Gallery in Paddington, Brown included him in a blanket denunciation of the Sydney artworld. This notorious protest work of 1964, called Kite, marked Brown's transformation into a self-styled outsider, while Lanceley took his first steps into the mainstream. He had become increasingly fascinated with Modernist techniques such as collage and bricolage, where scraps of paper and other objects were added to a work to create a dialogue with the everyday world.

Pieces such as Love Me Stripper (1963) and Kindly Shoot the Piano Player (1964) may have looked anarchic, but Lanceley was fastidious in his sense of detail. At that time he became friends with sculptor Robert Klippel, who had just returned from the United States. When Lanceley and Klippel found a cache of old wooden patterns used for casting machine parts, they knew it was a treasure trove.

In 1965 when Lanceley won the 1965 Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship, his major work - the freestanding sculpture, Icarus (1965) (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia) - was partially constructed from these wooden patterns. He set off for London that year as a rising star of Australian art. With him was Kay Morphett. Kay had left a failed early marriage, as had Colin, who had been briefly hitched to the artist Leonora Howlett. Kay and Colin would spend the rest of their lives together.

In London, success in Australia counted for little. Lanceley's trump card was a letter of introduction, written by curator Daniel Thomas to the British critic John Russell.

Impressed with what he saw, Russell arranged a meeting with Marlborough Fine Art, who gave Lanceley a solo exhibition in 1966. One of the visitors to the show was Joan Miro, who would be a guest at the young artist's studio.

For the following decade Lanceley lived and worked in London, where he showed with Marlborough Galleries and taught at the Chesea School of Arts. He continued to experiment with adding three-dimensional objects to the canvas. There were many pieces in a circular, or tondo, format, such as Suddenly Last Summer (1977) and The Lark Ascending (1978).

In 1980, after briefly relocating to Burgundy, the Lanceleys decided to head home. Arriving back in Sydney, Lanceley entered a fertile period that resulted in major works such as What Images Return (1981-82), Balmoral (1984) and Songs of a Summer Night (Lynne's Garden) (1985).

Lanceley was given a survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1987, with a catalogue essay by his old friend Robert Hughes. Shortly afterwards he bought a warehouse in Surry Hills that had belonged to legendary art dealer Rudy Komon, and then to his equally colourful successor, Ray Hughes. The home studio became a private museum, crammed with works of art, pottery, sculpture and bric-a-brac collected over many years. It was a congenial space, scene of many memorable dinners and gatherings.

Honours and appointments followed, including an Order of Australia in 1990. Lanceley became heavily involved in the fight for an independent National Art School, and ended as chairman of the NAS Advisory Board in 1994.

This was a matter of conscience for a man who was the most formidably articulate of artists. He had a passionate belief in the school's hands-on teaching traditions in an era when most colleges had become immersed in interdisciplinary theory.

Over the last decade of his life Lanceley grew gradually more distant from an artworld for which he felt little affinity. He believed art was a vocation, not a profession, and disliked the scene's increasingly bureaucratic tendencies. In many ways Lanceley remained an inspired amateur, preferring to remain in the studio rather than spend his time networking. He had always worked slowly, revising each piece innumerable times before it was released for exhibition. While he knew that perfection in art was impossible, he strived to get closer and closer. Integrity was far more important than productivity.

Lanceley's later works were looser than before, with parts of the background drawing left visible. There was the same devotion to beauty that makes one think of Matisse in his sickbed, drawing on the wall with a long stick. Although his energy may have been sapped by a chronic heart condition, Lanceley's late paintings retain the same buoyant, positive feeling that was present in his groundbreaking works of the 1960s, and those of his triumphant homecoming in the early 1980s. For over half a century his approach never wavered.

Colin Lanceley is survived by Kay, sons Tristan and Felix and sisters Gaynor and Joy.

Photographer Ian Lloyd and art critic, John McDonald travelled 50,000 km around Australia visiting painters for the project that eventually became the book "Studio- Australian painters on the nature of creativity". What began as a snapshot of Australian painting at the beginning of the twenty first century gradually became an inquiry into the nature of creativity. The selection was made with the aim of representing a broad cross-section of men and women working in a variety of styles, from abstraction to realism, as well as traditional Aboriginal painters.