SPENCER PRYSE, Tessa

1939 - ?

Geraldine A Tessa Spencer Pryse was born at Christchurch, Hampshire in 1939, one of the three daughters of artist Gerald Eric Spencer Pryse (1882–29 November 1956) and his wife Muriel Anstace Theodora Farrall (27 April 1905-1988), daughter of the Revd Laurence Meakin Farrall, who married in Paris in 1932. Tessa was educated at schools in France, rural Wales and Switzerland and at the age of 17 gained a scholarship to Byam Shaw School of Art, where she met her future husband and father of her two children. At the Byam Shaw School of Art she gained the first-year drawing prize and was considered one of the most promising first year students. She moved to the Black Isle, in the Scottish Highlands where her work was influenced by the Scottish Colourists and in 1991 Tessa moved to Wivenhoe in East Anglia. Tessa is a painter of interiors, figures, and landscapes direct from the subject, in whose work sunlight was an important element. She was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists and studied printmaking under Richard Bawden, and was invited by the keeper to be guest student at the Royal Academy Schools in 1983 and in 1984 won the Oppenheim Award to pursue printmaking. She works from Wivenhoe in Essex. Mixed shows included RA Summer Exhibition, NEAC, RP, RSA and the Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour Competition.

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Works by This Artist