Frederick Spratt
American artist
Frederick Spratt (1927 – April 29, 2008) was an American artist and educator, best known for his color theory paintings.
Early life
Born in Iowa, Spratt was the grandson of a house painter from whom he received his first lessons in painting. He later built upon this early training during his adolescence as a sign painter. He received his MA in Studio Art from University of Iowa in 1951, and in 1954 he began teaching in the Art Department at San Jose State University, where he taught the American figurative artist, Robert Graham (1938–2008) in 1961. In 1962 he took a sabbatical in England for one year, where he lived and painted representationally in St. Ives Cornwall, United Kingdom. During this period he created several figurative and landscape paintings. He returned to San Jose, California, in 1963 and continued to teach at San Jose State University where he served as the Chairman of the Art Department and as the interim Dean of Humanities and Arts.
Color theory painting
In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles and began to experiment with color theory, but continued teaching classes part-time at San Jose State University. Spratt was informed by the formalist art of Josef Albers, minimalist painting by Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt, and abstract expressionist painting by Barnett Newman; his work was also deeply influenced by his early days as a sign painter.
“Frederick Spratt” enters the record as american artist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Frederick, Spratt and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederick Spratt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.