Ranging from the exquisitely fine to the manically grotesque, his work sometimes incorporated ornate, yet compact, magical alphabets that appear, at first glance, to be asemic, but actually collapse meaning into striking idiographic sigils that would look right at home on any number of black metal albums – and undoubtedly informed many. They were an active mode of conveyance for occult energies and vibrations – the swirling, ectoplasmic tendrils from which odd figures emerge in some of his most dense and haunting work.Īs a painter and draftsman he worked fast, and constantly, producing hundreds of artworks from his teenage years to his death in 1956, aged 69.
For Spare, radio, and the waves that carried the music he loved to listen to, were more than just a metaphor for the spirit world. He communicated regularly with the spirit world, and explored it in trance states, encountering human, non-human and approaching-human entities. Spare was of course, also an occultist – perhaps primarily so. Visitors noted that his flats were always littered with exotic totems, tribal art and radio parts, and he regularly painted work onto wooden radio set panels and speaker cabinets (as in the piece illustrated here, sold at Bonhams Auction House in 2015). He was also a tinkerer with a fascination for radios, which he built for himself and for friends – a hobby popular with men in the 1920s and 30s.
While Spare was hardly a libertine, he was undoubtedly an improviser and experimenter, developing styles and techniques to create a visual aesthetic that, while broader than many people realise, was always his own. "Improvising an original theme," reads a caption in Spare's own scratchy hand, "Libertine of the Gods". There's a 1955 photograph of the South London mystic and artist Austin Osman Spare, in the last years of his life, playing the clarinet, his hair on end, looking like a wild jazz musician.
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