Garn Fawr

The vegetation found in the North Pembrokeshire landscape around John Piper's former holiday home at Garn Fawr is particularly lush and is often illuminated by an intense quality of light associated with the proximity of the coast. The resulting atmosphere is evoked by Piper's strongly coloured depictions of the district from the late-1960s onwards. Meanwhile many of these works reveal that the blinding reflections of sunlight from farm buildings' whitewashed walls when recently wetted by rainstorms did not escape Piper's attention.

Between 1964 and 1972 John Piper's oil paintings characteristically display a distinctive 'sculpted' surface texture. This is achieved by the artist's application of paint onto areas of plaster relief applied to the canvas, into which he had already incised the linear highlights of a basic design (this is reminiscent of a potter's inscribing of a design into the clay of a ceramic before firing, or even a printmaker's engraving of a metal plate: Piper was familiar with both techniques). The present work, Garn Fawr, which probably dates from 1970 or later, blurs the line between the idea of a 'painting' and a 'relief' and as such is an excellent example of a work which results from the artist's distinctive and characteristic development of a technique.

S.L.