SEDONA, Ariz. — Alan Graham Collier died peacefully of old age at his home in Sedona, Arizona, on Dec. 7, 2022.
He was born in Manchester, England, on Sept. 12, 1923, the son of Anne Millier Collier and Robert Stanley Collier. Educated at Manchester Grammar School and later at Honley High School in Holmfirth, he received a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, but instead joined the Royal Air Force in the summer of 1940 and was thrust immediately into the Battle of Britain. For the next five years, he flew Lancaster bombers over Germany and welcomed some of the first American flyers into Lincolnshire.
In 1944, he married a young classical singer, Mary B. E. Clacy, the daughter of the Vicar of Honley, Yorkshire, over her father’s objections, receiving permission from the courts and making national headlines in the process.
After the war, he received his diploma from the Slade and began his teaching career at St. Peter’s School, York, founded by Paulinus in 627 BCE, moving on to Giggleswick School, also in Yorkshire, and, finally, to Lancing College on the south coast where he established an art school in the crypt of the school’s magnificent 19th century Gothic chapel that was to grow into one of the most significant in the country.
During these years he was also painting and exhibiting, travelling abroad making drawings of the great cathedrals, and portraits of artists and musicians for the Radio Times. At an exhibition of his paintings in London, he was approached by James L. Jarrett, President of Western Washington State College, and offered the headship of its art department. In 1960 he moved with Mary and their three children to Bellingham, Washington and three years later to the University of Connecticut where in 1965 he was named Teacher of the Year.
He and Mary divorced in 1968 and in the course of a brief second marriage he moved back to Europe and worked for Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, helping to catalogue their collection of prints, until he was offered a full professorship at the University of Georgia where he taught until his retirement in 1984, as Professor Emeritus and later, as a Fellow of Davenport College, Yale.
In the 1960’s he wrote “Form, Space and Vision,” a seminal textbook that was to influence generations of art students, going into four editions and its companion, “Art and the Creative Consciousness,” both dealing with perception and the wellsprings of creativity, and strongly influenced by Jungian psychology. What is creativity, what makes an artist, what is the nature of the human spirit, why are we here, were questions he asked his entire life.
In 1977, he married Patricia Grover (nee Garvan) and for the next nearly forty years they travelled the world visiting all seven continents several times. Together they produced “Antarctic Odyssey,” a book on the rarely visited west side of the continent. He wrote a novel, “War Night Berlin,” about a nighttime bombing raid over that city and “What the Hell are the Neurons Up To?,” his final summation of those questions he had spent a lifetime asking, and for many of his later years, contributed regular blogs to Psychology Today.
Charismatic and colorful, a brilliant teacher, a generous and gentle man, he breathed, as a friend said of him, a different air from the rest of us.
He is survived by his wife of 45 years, two daughters, Wendy Collier-Parker (Alan) of Boussac, France, and Ruth C. Collier of Sharon, a son, Andrew Collier (Judee) of Nehalem, Oregon, and his grandchildren Ruth Oreschnick of Cambridge, England, and Marisa and Ian Graham-Collier, both of Portland, Oregon. He was predeceased by Mary and his granddaughter Lisa Oreschnick.
He is survived also by Kara, his beloved Border Collie rescue.
Arrangements are private, but donations may be made in his memory to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah and The Humane Society of Sedona.
