TRIBUTES have been coming in from all over the world to a celebrated South Lakeland artist and much-loved former teacher who has died, aged 91.

Maggie Angus Berkowitz, who was responsible for many of the decorative tile panels around Kendal, has died at her home in Milnthorpe.

Notably, she created the Rinteln twinning celebration panel in Elephant Yard and the toilet floors in the Brewery Arts Centre, as well as many public and private art works in the United Kingdom and overseas.

Maggie Angus was born in 1927 and grew up in Skerton in Lancaster. The oldest of six children she won a scholarship to Lancaster Girls Grammar School and then went on to study illustration at Lancaster School of Art followed by a teaching diploma at London University.

Maggie Angus had hoped to go to the Royal College of Art to study printing, but returning servicemen had priority at the end of the war and so she studied teaching instead.

She eventually moved back north to the Lake District and was an apprentice to George Cook in Ambleside and worked as a teacher at Brathay Hall. Mr Cook was the founder and main designer-maker of Ambleside Pottery. He ran the pottery from 1948 until he retired in 1968.

But it was in Italy that she really learned her craft as a tile artist, when she won a scholarship from the Italian government at the Faenza Istituto State da Arte Ceramica. She subsequently lived and worked in Tanzania and New York, married and had a family, before returning to the UK.

She worked as a pottery teacher at Milnthorpe Secondary Modern School from 1974-1985, while also pursuing her own art. She has worked and exhibited all over the world, particularly in Japan.

Maggie Angus created paintings with glazes and oxides on unglazed tiles, requiring an incredible knowledge of glaze chemistry as well as artistic talent.

Her work could be as small as a single tile to be hung like a painting or built into a wall, or a set of murals and portraits for a private swimming pool.

She has inspired students and fellow artists with her generosity and knowledge, and tributes have been coming in this week from all around the world.

Artist Paul Scott said: “Maggie was wonderful, positive, relentlessly enthusiastic and just a lovely person.”

Her funeral will be held on Saturday 17 November, at 12noon at the Catholic Church of Christ the King in Milnthorpe.