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A Dialogue on the Arts & The Art, part 1:

“…So you say that all the time you were at Art College – and all the time before that – you weren’t aware of Austin Osman Spare?”

“Correct. This gap in my creative perspective has been a terrible absence.”

“Why do you think he wasn’t mentioned?”

“I can only think of one explanation: art in our day and certainly during my time at art college is no longer grounded in magic, or if there is magic – such as the tricks of advertising and marketing – it is a cynical, empty magic…”

“I can only reverse that development on a personal level.”

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A Dialogue on the Arts & The Art, part 2:

“He ended his life – arguably – too early, living in squalor and virtual destitution.”

“It is terrible, because he had an auspicious start: his prodigious talent was recognized very early on. It is understandable he didn’t want to be a ‘society’ painter portraying the rich or do lucrative commissions. He refused to pander to these tastes. Yet I would say his artistic career went on the slide for different reasons, or maybe just one reason.”

“He had discovered the Occult, and paired with his amazing gift, he became Her servant and slave.”

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A Dialogue on the Arts & The Art, part 3:

“Up to the age of maybe fifty, when his health began to fail, he was sexually very active. He was a handsome virile man and he had no problem attracting women.”

“He portrayed them as they had never been seen before. Let’s examine the different ways he engaged with the female form.”

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THE NUDE & THE SATYR 

“His naked women with whom he most likely had sexual relations – and we’re not talking Mrs. Patterson here; that will come later – were ‘buxom’, natural, and mostly plain. He knew their flesh; still, the art he created from them was out of this world.”

“He could look at them with the eye of a satyr. He revived an ancient mode of being transposed into dark London. We all know what a satyr is: companion to the god Pan or Dionysus. But when the satyr in Austin Spare guided his hand when drawing or painting women – or one particular woman – you see something strange and extraordinary, and often shamelessly sensual and sexual.”

His friend Steffi Grant wrote that his work “was that weird window of wonder and terror of which few have succeeded in raising the blind.”

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A Dialogue on the Arts & The Art, part 4:

“Something in him seemed forever watchful, and you can see this in some of the self-portraits, whether their gaze is directed outwards or inwards.”

“And sometimes his ‘looking’ is part of a greater whole, as when he draws himself in astral company, occasionally amounting to a rout.”

“Do bear in mind that the concentrated stare you often find in Spare’s and other artists’ self portraits comes from looking intensely at your self in the mirror. But yes, a watchfulness and a lack of vanity or self-regard, except what serves his Art.”

“It enters a different dimension still when he transports himself into a woman, as when she lifts her eyes, her very form, upwards from an Earth that exerts a very powerful pull. He may give her wings, or at least a depiction of wings to consider. One of his loveliest and most mysterious is a drawing of a woman holding a shiny round object – a mirror? – in her hands. Full breasts are resting on them. A small snake touches her right hand with its snout. The delicate serpent encircles a partly truncated classical statuette. A black outline – object? – hovers near as do wings in the background. The bottom part of the drawing is taken up with Spare’s Alphabet of Desire.”

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A Dialogue on the Arts & The Art, part 5:

“This is how Kenneth Grant – in Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare – articulates the conundrum:

‘It is a matter of conjecture and mystification to all who knew him well why he elected to withdraw so completely from the company of the so-called cultured.’

“It was a disguise he felt he needed. You look at some of the imagery and you know he had to live in hiding – at least in part, and it was easier to do so among the dispossessed. Among the ‘so-called cultured’ he did not feel comfortable. Lack of a certain education which might have created awkward situations? Quite possibly. But they in their turn didn’t understand him. But then, who did?

‘Weave a circle round him thrice

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honeydew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise’

It was his own Paradise undoubtedly, one which only he might have elected and enjoyed, but his Art speaks volumes. Ostracized and entranced, he was lost in the hypnotic splendours of his own Xanadu.”

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[ ...to be continued... ]

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