Howard Jacobson TV - Jon Snow TV - Peter Ackroyd TV - James Fox TV - Stanley Spencer - Tim Marlow TV - Mary Beard TV -
Stanley Spencer in works like the portraits he painted in the 1930s of himself and his second wife Patricia Preece – I can barely breathe looking at this painting. Like an ant crawling over her body was how Stanley Spencer described the process of painting Patricia Preece ... If there is a more cruelly voluptuous piece of painting anywhere in art I don’t think I could bare to see it. Howard Jacobson, The Genius of British Art: Flesh, Channel 4 2010
Spencer’s Sistine Chapel. I love Spencer for his war and for his art. Jon Snow, The Genius of British Art: War
The Clydeside Shipyards ... Spencer turned out fourteen huge paintings ... Spencer’s shipyard paintings are works of political, social realism. The dignity of the humble ship worker in the fight against the enemy. ibid.
The greatest twentieth century artist of the river however is Stanley Spencer whose enduring image is that of Cookham, the village by the Thames where he grew up, and where he spent most of his life. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 2/4, ITV 2008
Stanley Spencer – he had a reverence for the river just as if it were one of the holy rivers that flowed from Eden. ibid.
Stanley Spencer had given four years of his life to the war ... He set about creating a masterpiece ... This is the Sandham Memorial Chapel. Few come here today ... This is Spencer’s war ... He is painting the banality of war. Dr James Fox, British Masters, BBC 2011
Every single wound of war is being healed in this picture, this chapel. ibid.
He [Stanley Spencer] began producing a series of inspired religious paintings that transformed the ordinary streets of Cookham into the sites of miraculous Biblical events. Dr James Fox, British Masters II BBC 2011
Stanley Spencer’s Cookham Resurrection depicts the heroic moment at the end of days when all the dead are reborn into paradise. But as always Stanley effortlessly combines the epic with the everyday. (Artist & End of the World) ibid.
For a British painter at this time Stanley’s work was dangerously explicit. ibid.
Everything has a sort of double meaning for me: there’s the ordinary everyday meaning of things, and the imaginary meaning about it all, and I wanted to bring these things together, and in this first big Resurrection of mine you have a good example of this sort of thing. Stanley Spencer
Heaven as a place of familiarity, a place of reunion ... The British painter Stanley Spencer. In this painting completed in 1927 we see Spencer’s imagined version of the Resurrection. Tim Marlow: Judgement Day: Images of Heaven and Hell: Heaven, Sky Arts 2004
Sir Stanley Spencer: Double Nude Portrait: The Artists and his Second Wife 1957. Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude II, BBC 2020