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Dennis Creffield

Born 1931, London. Died in 2011 in Brighton.

Dennis Creffield studied with David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic, London from 1948-51 and at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1957-61 where he won the Tonks Prize for Life Drawing and the Steer Medal for Landscape Painting. In 1961 he was a prizewinner in the John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, and in 1977 he won a major Arts Council Award for Painting. From 1964-68 he was Gregory Fellow in Painting at the University of Leeds. He lived in Brighton and taught at Brighton Polytechnic (now the University of Brighton) from 1968 - 1981.

In 1987 Creffield was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain, who had recently acquired his drawings of the Crossing at Wells Cathedral for its collection, to draw all twenty-six medieval cathedrals. He created a visual record comparable to Rodin's Cathedrals of France, and a verbal account of the experience, in the publication English Cathedrals which accompanied the resulting touring exhibition. Creffield's expressive drawings of English cathedrals have been followed by a series of eleven cathedrals in Northern France, including Bourges, Laon and Le Mans, exhibited at the Albemarle Gallery in 1991 while Paintings and Drawings of London 1960-90 was held at the Barbican Gallery in 1992. A retrospective exhibition of Creffield's work was mounted at the James Hyman Gallery in London in 2011.

His work has been acquired for numerous public art collections including Tate Britain, The British Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the Government Collection, the Imperial War Museum, Leeds City Art Gallery and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Dennis Creffield was greatly admired by fellow artists for his facility at capturing the essence of historic buildings, as well as landscape and portrait subjects; R B Kitaj described him as "one of England's most closely guarded secrets".

Coventry: The Old Cathedral Spire
Coventry: The Old Cathedral Spire 2
Coventry: The Old Cathedral Spire 3