Colin Spencer - Visual Arts

Visual Arts

During his twenties numerous of Colin Spencer’s drawings were published in The London Magazine, The Transatlantic Review and Encounter. A series of drawings of writers of our time was published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1959. Those he portrayed included John Betjeman, E.M. Forster, C.P.Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, Graham Greene, Alan Ross, Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Lehmann, Stevie Smith, V.S.Naipaul, and John Osborne, among others. An oil portrait of E.M. Forster hung for many years in his rooms at King’s College Cambridge. On his death Forster left it to Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and it is now in the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh.

Colin Spencer had huge fun working alongside Katharine Whitehorn to illustrate her column in the national Sunday newspaper, The Observer, with satirical drawings delineating the public’s interpretation of fashion trends. He was commissioned by the Royal Opera House to draw their idiosyncratic opera audience for their member’s Magazine. He has completed oil portraits for a wide range of private customers and collectors, including Carl Winter, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Lady Rawlinson; Diana Hopkinson; Michael Davidson; and Canon Frederic Hood of Pusey House, Oxford. His work resides in a wide range of private collections amongst those of Melvyn Bragg, Germaine Greer, Derek Grainger, Bob Swash, Diana Athill, Prue Leith and the late Mary Renault and Sir Huw Wheldon.

His artistic work since has ranged from landscape drawings of Winchelsea Beach and Rye countryside to oil portraits of the poet Harry Fainlight and has lately been exhibited in London, Rye and Brighton. A recent series of paintings entitled The Downs reflected the sensuous forms of the landscape of the South Downs where he lives. He is currently intensely involved in creating paintings which he describes as “images of the unknown, paths through conflict, compounds of sex and spirit, mysterious reflections, hints and fading memories which unsettle the darkness.” The themes of his present paintings are: War, Music, and Sex, the interior life of flowers, the sea bed and how do hills form roots.