Christopher Ransome Malcomson died peacefully and quietly with his family at his side at his home in Great Barrington on August 6, 2024. Chris was born in Liverpool, England, on February 18, 1936, the son of John Ransome Malcomson and Grace (Parnham) Malcomson. His parents told him that he was conceived on King George V’s Jubilee and that they called him Jubilee Chris.
When Germany launched its campaign of bombing major British cities in 1940, he was sent to live in Bath with his grandmother. Later in the war, again to achieve greater safety from the threat of German bombing, he was sent to live at Huyton Hill School near Lake Windemere in the north of England. He received his early education at Bootham School, a private Quaker Senior and Boarding School in York. He earned a degree in engineering at Loughborough College in Loughborough, Leicestershire, England.
For 30 years, Chris worked as a structural engineer with the engineering firm of F. J. Samuelly Ltd. His projects included such landmarks in London as the St. Thomas Hospital; the British Telephone Tower (the BT Tower); and stadiums, parking garages, and commercial high-rise buildings throughout England.
In 1991, Chris decided to dedicate himself to painting and enrolled at the Chelsea Art School. With his training and experience as an engineer, Chris had become very familiar with paper, drawing pens, and ink, so the transition from engineering to art was not as great a leap as one might expect. His artistic work also drew on his much earlier participation in Beryl Pogson’s “Work” group, where he learned glass engraving and made mosaics and pottery. During his six years with the Pogson group, he was introduced to the ideas of Maurice Nicholl, a neurologist and Jungian psychiatrist, as well as Pogson’s books and her interpretations of Shakespeare, all of which provided him with a solid grounding that influenced his poetry and art.
After leaving Chelsea Art School, Chris maintained a studio in London with other artists. Gaining confidence as a painter, Chris attended an artist-in-residence program at Fundación Valparaiso in Spain, where he met Virginia Bradley, an American artist and professor of art at the University of Delaware. Six months after their meeting in Spain, Chris and Virginia married on December 24, 2004. After living in Wilmington, Del., and Philadelphia, Penn., Chris and Virginia relocated to Great Barrington, where they established side-by-side studios and became immersed in the Berkshire art community.
Chris’ art took three forms: poems and drawings in small notebooks to which he added watercolors; more formal watercolors of scenes from Puerto Rico where Chris and Virginia had a winter home; and larger abstracts on canvas. Up until his last days, he enjoyed a daily walk to his studio and continued to work on a yet-to-be published book of his poetry and art.
Chris is survived by his wife Virginia Bradley; his children, Hettie Malcomson and her wife Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Nicholas Malcomson, and Bim Malcomson and her husband Richard Bleasdale; and his grandchildren, Hugo Bleasdale and Jane Bleasdale—all of whom, besides Virginia, live in the United Kingdom. Chris was predeceased by his parents and his siblings, Roger Malcomson and Anne Wells.
Chris lived a life filled with art, music, poetry, ideas, and travel. He read voraciously, interspersing fiction with biographies and other non-fiction works and always willing to talk about what he had read and how literature had impacted him, about the art he had seen, the music he had heard, the places he had sensed. Chris loved Agnes Martin, Barnet Newman, Mark Rothko, and Pierre Soulages; Louis Armstrong, J.S. Bach, Johannes Brahms, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan; T.S. Eliot, Hafez, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rumi; Greek mythology, Jungian psychology, and William Shakespeare; Egypt, Greece, Italy, Puerto Rico, Spain, Turkey, and the United States. He loved swimming and walking. A robust man, even late in life, Chris was eager to swim in the waters off the coast of Puerto Rico in the winter and, in the summer months, in the ponds and lakes near his Great Barrington home. Chris was admired for his courage, his humor, his independence of thought, and his total unwillingness to bend to convention. He will be missed by those who came to know him.
A celebration of Chris’ life will be held on the Autumn Equinox, Sunday, September 22, at Chris and Virginia’s home. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Berkshire Pulse. The Berkshire Pulse’s mission is to build and strengthen community life through diverse and accessible programming in performing, movement, and creative arts.
