He showed artistic ability from an early age and won several art prizes in elementary and high school.

In 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and flew a C-47 transport plane over “The Hump” (the Eastern Himalayas) in Burma, China and India, an extremely dangerous assignment, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and other honors.

After graduating in 1948, Spillenger enrolled at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where he studied with Willem de Kooning and Josef Albers and met John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Kenneth Noland and a number of painters with whom he'd remain close, Pat Passlof and Elaine de Kooning among them.

His work was admired by his peers; Pat Passlof called him “the most brilliant unknown painter of his generation.”[2] He was one of the first regular members of The club, the modern artists’ semi-official discussion venue,[3] and the Cedar Tavern, the unofficial one.

In 1955, he married Marian Dennison (née Katz) and with the birth of their first son Paul in 1956, they moved to an apartment at 95 East Tenth Street in the middle of a hub of the New York art scene.

Works by Raymond Spillenger can be found in the collections of the Walker Art Center[4] in Minneapolis, Minn., and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.