Moonlight over the Third Reich
Painter, draughtsman, camoufleur, printmaker and teacher Colin Moss was born in Ipswich, England on 30 April 1914. He studied at the Plymouth Art School (1930-1934) and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, studying under Gilbert Spencer, Charles Mahoney and Percy Horton (1934-38). During the Second World War, he became one of 83 camouflage officers and technicians working at the Ministry's Civil Defence Camouflage Establishment at Leamington Spa. In 1941, drafted into the Life Guards, he served in the Middle East as a captain before joining the Army Education Corps in Palestine after the war. A number of the pictures he painted at Stonebridge, and others painted on active service in the Middle East, were subsequently purchased by the War Artists' Advisory Committee and presented to the Imperial War Museum at the end of the conflict. Post-war he became a teacher at the Ipswich School of Art - studying briefly under Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg in 1961 - until his retirement in 1979; his pupils included Brian Eno and Maggi Hambling. He had solo exhibitions at the Kensington Art Gallery (1951) and Zwemmer Gallery (1955), became a founder member of the New Ipswich Art Group (1958), and the Six in Suffolk Group (1976), and frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Watercolour Society. Retrospectives were held at the Wolsey Art Gallery, Ipswich (1981), the Minories Gallery, Colchester (1983), and Bury St. Edmunds Art Gallery (1987). From 1981-95 Moss was an art critic for the East Anglian Daily Times. Colin Moss died in Ipswich, England on 16 December 2005.
