Influential artist and teacher Tom Offord, who passed away aged 88 last year.
Offord spent over a decade in Broken Hill from the mid-1960s teaching, and became a sought-after artist whose popular charcoals, pastels and watercolours captured the Silver City in all its rustic glory.
Adelaide-born Offord exhibited many times and won several art prizes with his detailed works which hang in galleries across the country, including in Broken Hill’s own Regional Art Gallery.
Broken Hill artist Clark Barrett said he was a young art teacher who had just been posted to when he met Offord in 1975.
Offord was head art teacher at BH High School in the 1970’s, and also who owned The Old Miners’ Arms Art Gallery in Crystal Street, and would go on painting and sketching excursions around the district. Offord and his wife Pat moved to the Mid North Coast in 1979.
There would be so many people with his work and he influenced so many (artists).
