Claire Spencer PS (1937 - 2025)
Bio
With great sadness, we announce that the artist Claire Spencer ARCA (aka Claire Postins) died peacefully on Sunday 13 July at her home in Bewdley, aged 88. Claire was a beloved partner, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She had a wide circle of friends, many of them artists and craftspeople and all of them art-lovers for whom Claire was a source of inspiration. Despite advanced years and failing health, Claire continued to draw and paint right until her last weeks, always seeing the beautiful and painterly in the natural environment especially the English countryside. Claire will be lovingly remembered by her partner Colin, her son Ben, daughter-in-law Susi, grandchildren Samson, Johannes and Frederik and great-grandson Nye.
Claire Spencer studied painting at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1963. She was awarded an Italian Government Scholarship and travelled to study painting in Umbria in 1966. With a long and distinguished career spanning more than 60 years, Claire Spencer consistently exhibited new work in regional, national and international exhibitions.
Claire worked in many mediums – charcoal, pencil, watercolour, inks and oils – but she was best known for her work in pastels, recognised in her election to the Pastel Society in 1985. Claire’s identity as an artist lay in landscape painting. In 1969, the late Carel Weight (then Professor of Painting at the RCA), described her as “a most talented and original painter with a most personal feeling for landscape – a field in which she expresses herself with special distinction”.
Claire travelled extensively to draw or paint – Italy, France, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India and China – all lovingly recorded in her artworks and more than sixty beautiful sketchbooks. Her goal was to make us more visually aware, and she used her paintings and drawings to counteract environmental damage such as her campaigns against destructive road building and housing development.
Claire exhibited widely throughout her career from the Young Contemporaries at the ICA in London in 1963 and frequently at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the New English Art Club and Pastel Society Annual Exhibition. In 2017 she had a major retrospective 'A Life with a View' at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists galleries in Birmingham with an accompanying book and, in the same year, she exhibited at the Council of Europe ‘Club des Arts’ Gallery in Strasbourg.
Claire was elected as an associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) in 1980 and as a member in 1985. Her commissions included the Mercia Kingdom and The Globes panels for Esso Motor Hotels in Coventry and Edinburgh in 1971. She won the RBSA Centenary Prize for Watercolour in 1968 and in 1991 won the Daler Rowney Prize for a group of pastel paintings. She was awarded the Landscape Prize at Mid Art in 2003, the John Singer Sargent prize at the Broadway Arts Festival in 2012 and the Pastel Society Schminke Award in 2014.