Richard Kidd combined his love of strenuous, often dangerous, outdoor activity with painting the dark, brooding mountainscapes and turbulent lochscapes that he saw when rock climbing in remote and rugged parts of the world — most typically the Scottish islands and Highlands. His large canvases, painted with flat acrylic and graphite washes or latterly in oils — and sometimes with raindrops and windblown sand adding to the mix — had just the same immediacy as his smaller pencil and charcoal drawings, and all spoke of his intense joy in the rocks and the water themselves, as well as in painting and drawing them.

“I travel to remote places, just to be there,” was his explanation to visitors to the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, website, “but also in order to make drawings and small paintings as a way of looking and communicating the sense of immediacy those places offer. Back in the studio these works become springboards into large-scale paintings, in which the energy and urgency of on-the-spot mark-making is reinterpreted with different tools and materials.”

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Richard Kidd studied fine art at Newcastle University. In the year of his graduation (1974) he won a prize in the John Moores Contemporary Painting competition, as well as one of the Abbey scholarships in painting at the British School at Rome that are granted to “exceptionally promising emergent painters”. He exhibited regularly with the Rowan Gallery in London, starting in 1977 and finishing in 1993, when that gallery closed, and in 1980 he travelled to the US, assisted by a Harkness fellowship, spending a year in San Francisco and six years in New York, exhibiting in both cities and responding to the highly charged urban landscape of New York, in particular, by venturing into oils as well as acrylics.

He also exhibited — continuously for the past ten years — at the Stour Gallery, Shipston-on-Stour, and images of his atmospheric paintings of scenes such as An Gairadh, Isle of Mull, or pines by Loch Uisg, still adorn that gallery’s website, where his artist’s statement reads: “My paintings are about remote, mountainous landscapes because that’s where I feel most at home. I make them in ways which push my control of materials to the limit because that feels like ‘being there’. Georges Braque once said, ‘Making a painting is like taking a journey.’ This seems to me to be a fitting comparison. Sometimes you know where you’re going. The route is planned. Other times you get lost, perhaps deliberately, and end up somewhere totally unexpected. Both approaches are equally valid. The one quality, common to both, which distinguishes the successful painting from the failure is a sense of place.”

His paintings have been exhibited in museums of modern art from Rio de Janeiro to Zurich, and everywhere from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney to the Biscuit Factory art gallery in his home city of Newcastle, where he was one of the founding artists in 2002.

Although first and foremost a painter, he was also known as a children’s writer, beginning with Almost Famous Daisy! in 1996 — written when, significantly, his daughters Rachael and Daisy were 5 and 3 respectively. He wrote and illustrated this first book, which was shortlisted for the Mother Goose Award for newcomers to children’s book illustration. However, as the story does somewhat implausibly follow its very young child heroine on a tour of the sites that inspired some of the world’s best-known artists, from Van Gogh’s Saint-Rémy to Jackson Pollock’s Wyoming, the reviewer who thought it “more of a limited art history primer for the Dr Seuss crowd than an outright storybook” was probably right.

Thereafter, the stories became simultaneously less arty and more fanciful, and were illustrated by a variety of other artists. Monsieur Thermidor: A Fantastic Fishy Tale (1997) was the first of several to make play of its author’s fascination with shellfish and other aquatic creatures — perhaps inevitably given that another of Kidd’s passions was for cooking.

With eyecatching illustrations by Kidd’s wife Lindsey, whose startling crustaceans were brightly coloured salt-dough figures, this story of a restaurant-owning lobster who gratefully donates his recipe for seaweed soup to the kindly human chef who spares his life was successful enough for a sequel in 2001, Lobsters in Love: A Whirlpool Romance. But it was koi carp that took centre stage in The Giant Goldfish Robbery (1999), one of Kidd’s several adventure stories for older children, which was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award (for authors and publishers) in 2000.

Kidd’s enthusiasm for rock climbing and other outdoor activities inevitably exposed him to risks. He was struck by lightning twice, and his death occurred while swimming near a waterfall in the Philippines. He was convivial, a loyal friend, a gifted teacher of painting (at Reading and Newcastle universities), and devoted to his daughters.

Divorced from his wife, he is survived by their two daughters and by his partner, Ailsa Lamble, with whom he was on holiday at the time of his death.

Richard Kidd, artist and children’s writer, was born on June 22, 1952. He drowned while swimming on July 19, 2008, aged 56