Colin Moss

Maggi Hambling – Colin’s student from 1962 to 1964

“Painting is a physical business … it is something you make with your hands, and so that’s why I think he [Colin Moss] can draw workers and people doing things with their hands and bodies so well. There’s the feeling of the making of the painting being a physical activity, so he’s a worker just like the people he’s portraying.”

Ian Collins – The Guardian

The painter and teacher Colin Moss … was a leading light in the East Anglian art scene for six decades – a social realist who studied under Oskar Kokoschka and applied firm draughtsmanship and the forceful vision of European expressionism to the docks and terraces of his native Ipswich. There he drew and painted scenes of ordinary life – men in the pub, women eating sandwiches in the park or bending on doorsteps to pick up milk. “I draw working-class people because they are more interesting than middle-class people,” he said. “I have no political allegiances.”

Mervyn Levy – Welsh artist, art critic and author

“Colin Moss stands favourably alongside the Kitchen Sink artists of the 1950s such as John Bratby, Derek Greaves and Jack Smith but, as a master draughtsman of the highest order, he avoided the prevalent trends of abstractionism to tread a lonelier, yet determined, path outside the mainstream. He portrayed the hard-hitting realities of urban and working-class life in Ipswich and London from the 1930s to the present day yet the work was cosmopolitan.”

Andrew Clarke – Arts Editor at the East Anglian Daily Times

“As an artist, Colin drew and painted what he saw around him. His work functions not only as great art but also as a valuable social document about what life was like in Ipswich and across the country from the late 1940s until his death in December 2005. His portraits of workers leaving the Ransomes and Rapier factory, prostitutes on street corners, old women walking to the shops, laden with bags are an important part of Moss’ artistic legacy to the town.”

Ipswich’s Lowry

Sweeper

Street Drinkers, Civic Drive, Ipswich

Window Cleaner, Bramford Road, Ipswich

The Mulberry Tree Pub Ipswich