AOS and Moore

AOS's self-portrait

Selected excerpts from a video available on Youtube here. It was recorded on the occasion of Austin Osman Spare: Fallen Visionary exhibition (14 Sep 2010 – 13 Nov 2010, The Cuming Museum, London). Moore is a great admirer of Austin Osman Spare's work and life.

Alan Moore: [...] Austin Spare is one of the most overlooked figures in British Art history. The obituaries that surrounded his death remarked that with his passing England had lost one of its best ever nude study artists.
When you think that we are now some 50 odd years since his death and except in knowledgeable and specialist circles he is completely unknown...

 

[...] Austin Spare decided that he was going to pretty much excommunicate the rest of the world and go and live amongst thieves, prostitutes, ordinary working people. He was taking it all in, he was absorbing it and he was turning it into images.

Not only was he an incredible artist he was also in my opinion possibly the greatest English magician of the 20th century. Although obviously not magic of the Paul Daniels' stage variety but something of, I thought, older provenance.
I think the magic offers the artist a new way of looking at their consciousness and of looking at where they get their ideas from.

[...]  if you can manipulate your own consciousness and perhaps that of others which is truly something that all artists are trying to do - whether they're magicians or not - then you will have effected an act of magic.

[closely admiring an AOS painting/drawing] This is a wonderful example of a typical Austin Osman Spare's image if there is such a thing. If you are in a magical state then if you create a piece of art while in that state it is a way back into that state.

It says [referring to the painting] "intrusive nostalgia re-remembering" which I think means the state of consciousness where suddenly memories of past lives or genetic history if you like suddenly intrude upon you without your necessarily bidding them to do so.

[...] Spare was a visionary. He was somebody like William Blake who was not distinguishing between his art and his spirituality, who felt that the world inside him was as valid and important as the world outside him.