Painting: Nick Spencer
The persistent clang of metal slamming down upon metal was what it took to finally raise concern. It is 1982 and in a desolate yard behind a house in Scarborough eight-year-old Nick Spencer frantically digs his hammer into a can of corned beef.
Poking a brittle lollipop stick into the crevice he has burrowed, the young boy picks out small clumps of the can’s treasured contents, feeding the mouth of his wailing little sister. The two of them were abandoned by their mother three days earlier.
“I remember a lot of professionals suddenly being there and I remember going to my grandma’s and her saying ‘I’m not having the little brats’,” Nick recalls 27 years on. He has an astounding recollection of a life fraught with tragedy and drama, memories most would rather forget. In the 27 years since that fateful day in Scarborough he has battled crippling drug and alcohol addictions, spent bouts in prison and lived on the streets.
He carries the scars from two stabbings as well a bullet lodged deep within his left leg, courtesy of a gun-wielding drunk in Blackpool.
Now though, 35-year-old Nick is preparing to start work on a £1,100 commission from a London art collector.
The collector previously purchased a unique portrait Nick had painted of iconic Blondie vocalist Debbie Harry. This time around the connoisseur has requested a depiction of late punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone.
This a realm of artistic endeavour Nick feels most comfortable in, it is a combination of his two greatest passions in life: art and music.
“All my artwork is a lot of portraits of musicians. I just started painting who I like. I love The Who, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin,” Nick says.
“For most kids, if they showed an inkling towards being good at painting their parents would get them some materials but I didn’t get any of that,” Nick remembers.
“I’d open fag packets up from the inside to draw on and I’d get charcoal from the fire because I didn’t have a pencil.” This was the cold reality of Nick’s primitive artistry.
Shortly after their mother abandoned them and their grandmother refused to take them, Nick and his sister were placed in the care of their father in Barnsley.
Nick endured sustained physical abuse by his father for years, eventually running away at 14 to Scarborough and a return to the mother that had abandoned him six years earlier. The reunion was inevitably short-lived and by the age of 16 he was back in Barnsley with his volatile father. During his time in Scarborough though, Nick had been due to sit his GCSEs but days before his first exam his mother threw him out.
“The only GCSEs I got were Art and English because they were coursework, I got two As,” Nick points out.
“My mum threw me out because I drank a full bottle of whisky and I had to have my stomach pumped.”
With his son back in Barnsley after a two-year hiatus, Nick’s father tightened his grip over the youngster in a manner which proved to be more catastrophic than ever.
“I began plastering for my dad and in exchange for the work he gave me prescription painkillers and morphine. He got me taking three lots of three tablets everyday and I ended up hooked,” Nick recounts solemnly.
From there Nick swiftly moved onto harder drugs and by the age of 17 he had sunk into a crippling heroin addiction, spending much of the next 15 years in and out of prison.
In the solitude of incarceration he rekindled some of his boyhood creativity.
“Prison was where I started drawing again,” Nick says. “Someone said ‘I like your drawing, do you do portraits?’ If I looked now at the first ones I did I’d laugh. But they were good enough for people to go ‘wow, look at that!’ So I started saying ‘look if you want my paintings go and get me some Subutex,’ which is a heroin-like substance.” In exchange for the drug, Nick would illustrate letters home for inmates and draw portraits of their loved ones.
Outside of prison Nick was still struggling with a heroin addiction and by 2005 he was living in Sheffield.
Over the next couple of years he was forced to sleep rough on Devonshire Green in the city centre, surviving off the loose change he could amass from hours of begging.
It was during this time that he began visiting the Cathedral Archer Project, a drop-in centre on Campo Lane providing support to Sheffield’s homeless.
Nick began taking art classes at the project and before long he was running the classes himself. From there onwards Nick’s artwork blossomed and it began garnering widespread interest.
He recently sold two of his paintings to The Frog and Parrot pub in Sheffield for hundreds of pounds.
“I was very nervous because I used to beg outside the door of The Frog and Parrot, I used to sit on the doorstep – it’s a good little spot. I used to get moved on and I thought ‘what if the owner remembers me?’,” Nick remembers timidly approaching the pub in hope of a sale.
“But the owner didn’t recognise me and he bought a painting I did of the Arctic Monkeys, he was really impressed. He recently bought another one I did of Joe Cocker.”
With the support of the homeless project and his art, Nick has now been off drugs for nearly two years and has a flat of his own in Pitsmoor. He has already enjoyed two exhibitions of his work, one in Sheffield Cathedral and the other in Castle Market, and he promises there will be more to come.
Nick is also embarking on a trip to Paris, as part of the college art course he has undertaken in a bid to reach university.
It’s a remarkable progression from the child forced to unravel his mother’s discarded cigarette packets so that he could daub with pieces of coal from the fire. But this is a rebirth for the artist with a tortured past, only this time the uncertainty of the future excites him.
“I’m sure I’ll have a breakthrough with my art. There’s something just about to come, I just have to keep painting though.”