Biography
Colin Spencer was born in 1933 in Thornton Heath, London, and was largely brought up in the south of England. From an early age he knew that he wanted to paint and write. He attended Brighton Grammar School and went on to study at Brighton Art College, but he feels now that he is wholly self-educated. His colourful family provided his youthful imagination with rich material for his later novels, as did his passionate emotional involvements with both men and women.
He spent his period of National Service as a pacifist in the Royal Army Medical Corps in war-ravaged Hamburg. He has subsequently lived in London, Vienna, Athens and on the Greek island of Lesbos. His first novel was published when he was 28. His portrait of E.M. Forster was painted when he was 29. He has twice been married and has one son and two grandsons.
He has never stopped painting and writing, and now lives in East Sussex where he is writing his autobiography, staring with delight at the Seven Sisters, gardening, and producing the paintings he feels he has striven to create throughout his life – recently described in The Financial Times How to Spend It magazine as “muscular, powerfully envisaged oils”, the work of “a remarkable Indian summer”.
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