Artist, teacher with drive for design dies

Leading New Zealand designer Jan Beck, whose career included co-ordinating the interior colours for Toyota Corolla cars and designing Crown Lynn Potteries' centenary ceramic dinnerware range, died at her home in Kerikeri last month. She was 74.

Ms Beck was also a successful painter and sculptor, exhibiting in England and New Zealand, and selling paintings to people around New Zealand and overseas.

She trained as a teacher after graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts with an honours diploma of fine arts, and taught art at Tauranga Girls College for two years before embarking on an extended working holiday in the United Kingdom and Europe. During her four years away she enrolled in the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome, and took up a position as fabric designer in the Studio Stella Pines.

After returning to New Zealand she established herself as a designer, while retaining her connection with Rome, showing her own collection and an Italian collection in Sydney and Melbourne twice a year.

She went on to create some of the first wallpaper designs for Vision Wallcoverings, which led to her appointment as resident designer for Vision.

Ms Beck was the interior colour co-ordinator of the Toyota Corolla in the 1980s. She also created the British paints 1000 colours range; and designed the bed and bath co-ordinates for Bremworth Carpets, and T-shirts and bags for tourist outlets nationwide.

She won a Wool Board Special Projects Award for her work as interior and uniform designer for Mount Cook Airlines.

Later in life she was better known for her paintings. She was also a talented teacher, and ran art classes for children and adults.

In the 1990s, Ms Beck and her husband Barry Dyer moved from Auckland to Langs Beach where they ran a bed and breakfast business. In 2000, they moved to Kerikeri and developed a 1.25-acre sub-tropical garden, which was open to the public.

Ms Beck was one of the founding artists in the successful Art Upstairs Gallery, the longest-running gallery in Kerikeri, and also did voluntary work for the Kerikeri SPCA.

She is survived by her husband, Barry.