Art, John Piper,

JOHN PIPER

John Piper was born in 1946 in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, and moved to Cornwall on the south coast of the country in 1963.
He settled in Cornwall and for most of his working life has used the countryside and coastline as his inspiration.
You can see his intimacy with the land reflected in his paintings.
He always paints in oils and not, as many artists do these days, in acrylics. His paintings are oil on canvas and sometimes oil on board.
Each painting uses a limited range of colour which captures the light and mood of his chosen landscape. He often uses thick strong colour, sometimes scraped back or scored and then covered in a series of coloured glazes.
Some paintings show the basic drawing through the paint and some are layered to the extent they appear to be relief work.
His landscapes are full of hedges, boundaries, coastline cottages, moors, cliffs, headlands, fields, and of course many, many interpretations of the coastline he loved. This land lends itself to the soft blues, greens and ochres so often found in his work. The effect can be sharp or gentle, hard or soft.
John Piper is a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and the Penwith Society. I often show Scottish artists who paint the Scottish coastyline and show the traditional way of life in and around the area where I live. This man is not Scottish, he is English and paints a specific area of England, but from these paintings alone you can see how similar this area is to the the East Coast of Scotland. There are many similarities in the landscape and many similarities between this work and the work of the artists working in this area.

delete reply brendainmad wrote on Feb 19, '11 These are lovely. I'd like to see them in person.

delete reply mitchylr wrote on Feb 19, '11 I love his use of colour and light. I'm familiar with Cornwall and he paints it so beautifully.

delete reply nemo4sun wrote on Feb 19, '11 brilliant :)

delete reply acousticeagle wrote on Feb 19, '11 forgetmenot525 said He always paints in oils and not, as many artists do these days, in acrylics. These are effective and it's easy to appreciate his style. I really like the blue/yellow and mauve/yellow pictures. I've given thought to using acrylics but haven't used them for many years. I always like the quality of oil paint but I've found that I like to work a lot faster than what drying time sometimes allows, especially in the colder months. So I now use a Windsor and Newton fast drying oil paint called "Griffin Alkyd". It's the closest thing to acrylic I can find in oil paint.