Spencer

View from Cookham Bridge by Stanley Spencer (1936)

"In his blending of the transcendent and the mundane, Spencer was

one of the most visionary British painters of the twentieth century."

Stanley Spencer  (1891 -1959) was born and raised in the village of Cookham by The River Thames in the county of Surrey. That village remained a key reference point for the rest of his life. It figured in much of his art and was his spiritual home. Furthermore, it is where he was buried along with his first wife Hilda.

Stanley Spencer was an odd fish and in following his calling to be an artist, he did not play by anybody else's rules. He developed his own styles and pursued the themes that interested him - from Cookham to warfare to spirituality to shipyards to nudity to surrealism.  In his private life, he was often tormented - mostly by his own inadequacies as he reached for a way of being that he hoped would rise above mundanity. Of course, this always eluded him.

In World War I, he volunteered to be a hospital orderly and it was only in the last full year of the conflict that he joined an infantry unit in Macedonia fighting against combined German and Bulgarian forces. Unlike his older brother Sydney, Stanley Spencer survived that war and returned to Cookham to finish a painting he had begun there in 1915 called "Swan Upping".

He was a very driven and productive artist - mostly working in oils but also sketching prolifically in pencil. The strange painting shown below is "Sunflower and Dog Worship" from 1937. It sold in 2011 for £5.4 million - underlining his status as one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century.

In this short blogpost, I feel that I have not done Stanley Spencer's rich and fascinating artistry the justice it deserves and for that I am sorry - especially to the artist himself...

Photograph of Stanley Spencer

in The National Portrait Gallery, London

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/u8NpfZy