Austin Osman Spare was born December 30, 1888. For a time he fell under Aleister Crowley’s influence, and then fell out of it, though his occult perspective continued to inform his work. In the late 20th century he became a cause celibre of the nascent Chaos Magick movement who’s sigil-tech was derived from Spare. Artnet had this to say about him:
“Austin Osman Spare was a British artist whose technically proficient depictions of occult imagery were based in the aesthetics of Art Nouveau and the Symbolist movement. Spare’s work was intertwined with his belief in the Occult religion of Thelema, started by Aleister Crowley in the early 1900s. “Art is the instinctive application of the knowledge latent in the subconscious,” the artist has said. His attention to composition and line are similar to the formal aspects in works by Egon Schiele, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustav Klimt. His subject matter often includes portraiture and allegorical landscapes that elude to classical mythology. Born on December 30, 1886 in London, United Kingdom, he went on study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington. Spare’s works are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, among others. He died on May 15, 1956 in London, UK.”
http://www.artnet.com/artists/austin-osman-spare/
