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John Piper
by Rigby Graham
(11 Apr 2003) |
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From childhood and throughout the rest of his life Piper absorbed in words and pictures a broad swathe of this country’s Romantic heritage. He explored, drew, and photographed its architecture and its vernacular buildings. In his printmaking, as in his painting, he frequently took as his subject matter cottages and castles, abbeys and churches, mountains and menhirs, houses, coastlines, beaches, piers and harbours. His enthusiasm for Gilpin, Turner and Pennant, for Blake and Cotman, for antiquarian guide books and ecclesiastical buildings stimulated his imagination and permeated so much of his work in many different media. This makes an interesting comparison with his journeys in France, Italy and elsewhere and the lithographs and screenprints of European châteaux and palaces, abbeys and monasteries.
His painting, drawing, book illustration, photography and printmaking, his designs for stained glass and fabrics, his murals, stage sets and costume designs, and tapestries throughout his working life, attracted comment and frequently considerable corrosive criticism. His pictorial work at different times was attacked for being dramatic, decorative, topographical, illustrative, neo-Romantic, old fashioned, unrealistic, and too much concerned with rich colours and textures. All of this reflected his interests, his strengths and his knowledge. It all contained ‘too many references, too much meaning’. These, his attributes and his understanding, are reflected in so much of his printmaking which is in this current selection. His involvement with abstraction and experimentation with collage, construction and assemblage of the early 1930s had a lasting influence on him. It remains a strong underlying factor in almost all his work and can most readily be seen as a structural basis for so much of his graphic imagery. This is particularly evident in his etching, his lithography, and aquatint, and to a lesser degree in his silkscreens which were based on already finished compositions in ink, watercolour, gouache and mixed media. Here the underlying abstraction had come into its own at the earlier painting stage, and in many instances it still remains easily seen and read, in spite of the sometimes complicated intercession of later processes and separations.
In recent years the Goldmark Gallery has handled a few of Piper’s working designs and preparatory studies. These are not often seen. Included here are other working designs – a mixed media and collage for the lithograph Lewknor, Oxfordshire, textured walls, traceried windows and for the proposed stained glass window at St Andrews, Plymouth. There are also silkscreened fragments for a Sanderson fabric of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice and a mixed media study for The Rape of Lucretia.
The largest screenprint and one of the most impressive and colourful is Five Gates of London. The design was originally prepared for a large tapestry which was woven in Edinburgh. This design was later adapted as a screenprint and produced at the Kelpra Studios. It is Piper at his most joyful and decorative and reveals his long experience with façades, stage sets and murals where the imagery is held at the picture plane and any piercing of arch, door or window embrasure reveals at most a shallow stage. This is also evident in his Venetian lithographs of San Marco and San Zobenigo; in his English lithographs of Tickencote and Lewknor.
The best topographical prints have that genius loci in time, rather than merely in the representation of the place, and much of Piper’s printmaking has this quality, in the same way as it is reflected in his painting, and which is clearly evident in this collection of his work.
Rigby Graham 2002
Painter, printmaker and writer
Rigby Graham contributed the essay on Piper's book illustration in the Tate Gallery Piper Retrospective Catalogue of 1983 |
There are 2 articles on John Piper:
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