Ken Spencer was born in Liverpool. After leaving school, he very quickly decided to pursue his interest in art and went to Liverpool Art College to study Fine Art. He moved to Northumberland in 1974 to set up the art department at a new school in Tyneside. Fourteen years later, he was appointed as Head of Art at Whitley Bay High School. Throughout his teaching career, Ken managed to exhibit his paintings and also develop further interests in various crafts such as screen printing and pottery. Ken has held many one man exhibitions since he started painting. His work has moved from being mainly focused on figures and portraits to images of dramatic Northumbrian landscapes. The early exhibitions in Liverpool, Hull, Leeds and York showed a fascination with the human form and figure groupings. There were also some very powerful portraits. But over time, this work has been replaced by his interest in the fall of light on local landscape. Some of his more recent paintings have become almost abstract in their insistence on depicting the transient effect of light. Ken works rapidly in transparent layers and washes. These are then built up into vigorous textures with quite thickly applied opaque paint. In this way he hopes to capture the quality of light and the raw physical nature of the Northumbrian landscape. Most of his work is produced in his workshop. Often as many as ten paintings are in progress at any one time. Each image is then overpainted and reworked until he is satisfied with the essence of the picture. In a sense, each painting is a dynamic and open ended process. Occasionally, some paintings cannot be resolved. And sometimes the image almost dictates its own development.