Ken Sprague

Early life Ken Sprague was born in Bournemouth on 1 January 1927.

Sprague was educated at Alma Road Elementary School and Porchester Road Secondary Modern School, where the headmaster, noticing his talent, recommended that he apply to the local art school. He won a scholarship to Bournemouth Municipal College, attending from the age of 13½. To pay for the cost of materials, his mother took on a cleaning job. He briefly worked for a volunteer labour battalion in Yugoslavia, was commissioned by The Scouter to make drawings of a scouts convention, and illustrated a book for the Boy Scouts Association.

Cartoonist, designer, journalist, activist From 1950 to 1954, Sprague worked in a Carlisle mining company's design office; he also produced cartoons for local newspapers, and was a member of staff of the Tullie House school of art, giving lectures to the local art society. He then moved to London as the Daily Worker'''s publicity manager, contributing, in addition, as a journalist and cartoonist. He joined the Communist Party Artists Group led by Clifford Rowe.

In 1959, together with Ray Bernard, a socialist businessman, Sprague set up a design company, Mountain and Molehill, to serve the Labour movement,

In the early 1960s, Sprague was involved in raising funds from unions to support Centre 42, a cultural hub (established by Arnold Wesker and others) in London's Roundhouse.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Sprague designed several settings for the Unity Theatre's productions of The Apple Cart, The Cherry Orchard, and The Crucible, among others. an independent London- and West Nyack-based publisher.

In the late 1960s, Sprague began editing The Record, the official publication of the Transport and General Workers' Union, illustrating it with his own cartoons. In the 1980s, his cartoons appeared in Anti-Apartheid News.

Poster and print-maker Sprague designed posters for, among others, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, and the Martin Luther King Memorial Fund. In the late 1950s, he created posters protesting against pit closures in Wales, and a series of anti-racist linocuts, London Black and White. A 1971 poster opposed the British Industrial Relations Act. Sprague's work for the Martin Luther King Memorial Fund won him an award from the UK's Council of Industrial Design in its 1969 poster competition. His design, incorporating a stylised hand obstructing a bayonet, was called "poignant, well drawn and well designed" by the judges.

Many of his works concerned wars and conflicts, including the Vietnam War, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Kosovo War, and the Iran–Iraq War. He was a war artist during the latter, accompanying an Iraqi regiment during an attack on Abadan. Sprague met Saddam Hussein and sketched him. He responded to criticism of this encounter and his involvement with Iraq by maintaining that he was documenting the horrors of war, the subject which had brought him to create political art in the first place. by the left-wing collective Cinema Action. He was the subject of a 1970 documentary produced by John Green (his future biographer

In 1976, Poster Man, a documentary about Sprague, was broadcast by the BBC as part of its Omnibus series. Directed by Jeff Perks and introduced by Humphrey Burton, it was repeated in 1977. In 1984, Sprague presented a five-part documentary series, Everyone A Special Kind of Artist, on Channel 4. In each half-hour episode, he interviewed an artist or group of artists and talked about their life and work.

Psychodramatist In 1971, Sprague moved with his wife Sheila, a potter, to Holwell, a farmhouse near Barnstaple, and converted it into an arts centre. Sheila died in 1973. During this period, Sprague wrote about his experiences as a psychodramatist helping young people with learning difficulties; explained, using short vignettes, the core principles of psychodrama; and contributed a chapter to a handbook on the subject: he illustrated all three works. He also described his attendance at an international conference on psychodrama and group analytic psychotherapy in Buenos Aires in 1985, where he and Karp ran a workshop on the 1982 Falklands War.

In 1998, Sprague and Karp moved to Lynton and set up the Hoewell International Psychodrama Centre.

Death Ken Sprague died in Barnstaple on 25 July 2004.

Exhibitions

"Ken Sprague: Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs", December 1950, Southampton "Peterloo: Prints to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary", August 1969, Peterloo Gallery, Manchester "Printer and Potter at the Peterloo: Ken and Sheila Sprague", January 1971, Peterloo Gallery, Manchester "Artists in Tribute to the Miners' Struggle and for Trade Union Solidarity", AprilMay 1974, Congress House, London "Ken Sprague: An Exhibition of Posters, Prints, Sculpture", December 1977January 1978, Foyles Art Gallery, London "Ken Sprague: Prints and Drawings", SeptemberOctober 1981, Iraqi Cultural Centre, London "Ken Sprague: Recent Works", AprilMay 1982, Newlyn Art Gallery "A World to Win: Posters of Protest and Revolution, MayNovember 2014, V&A, National Print Museum (2015), William Morris Gallery (2016), and others