About the Artist
Philip Frederick Joseph Spanier was born on September 13, 1926, in Denver, Colorado. He demonstrated an innate artistic ability when, by the age of five, he began carving wooden figurines. His keen ability to interpret his environment with an overlay of layers of sentient stirrings progressed from wood sculptures to manifest artistic expressions in clay and fine drawing.
As he matured into a young man during World War II, Philip joined the US military – serving honorably in the Air Force from 1944 until 1946. His passion for sculpting and painting continued to evolve unabated and led, shortly after the end of World War II, to his fervent immersion and subsequent creation of paintings reflective of movements such as contemporary abstract, cubism, abstract, post modernism, and surrealism.
His varied and prolific forms of artistic expression profoundly resonated with the art community – artists and connoisseurs alike – leading to the presence of many of his sculptures and painting in the Los Angeles Art Expo (1989) and the subsequent opening of the Philip Spanier Studio Gallery in the Belcaro -Cherry Creek neighborhood of Denver, Colorado (1995). His art now constitutes one of the largest private art holdings in the United States.
His work is notable for its high energy, vivid imagery, and singular interpretive force. During a televised interview, Philip Joseph Frederick Spanier was quoted as saying “I have been an artist from my earliest thoughts. I have wanted to put into form my thoughts and emotions, be it in a woodcarving or a simple illustration drawn by pen. What would the world be like without art? It would be dark.”