Garn Fawr, Pembrokeshire II

Garn Fawr, Pembrokeshire II is perhaps the largest and most impressive of a distinct group of intensely coloured and highly abstracted landscape paintings and gouaches which John Piper completed at the end of the 1960s. Many of the works, including the present one, relate to scenery in the vicinity of Garn Fawr near Fishguard in South West Wales where Piper had acquired a property in 1962. The strength of the palette used in these works is striking and can be attributed, in part, to the way Piper's eye had been retrained by recent summer visits to the Dordogne and the South of France where he developed a renewed sensitivity to the zest and vitality of sunlit landscapes and vegetation. It is also notable that Piper's most abstract stained glass window designs date from this period in the late 1960s - these were often derived from landscape motifs and show, as part of the artist's characteristic response to the demands of the medium, a deployment of a full range of strong, translucent colours. At this time a high degree of 'cross pollination' was occurring between Piper's work as a painter and as a designer.

Features of local topography can be identified in Garn Fawr, Pembrokeshire II, including stone walls, the rocky outcrop at Garn Fawr and distant mountains, but it is also important to note Piper's artistic statement of April 1969 which is recorded in the catalogue of the exhibition where the work struck a keynote:

'Pictures of places rather than things. The titles are the names of places, meaning that there was an involvement there at a special time: an experience affected by the weather, the season and the country but above all concerned with the exact location and its spirit for me ... the emotion generated by [the involvement] at one moment in a special place. They are about what Paul Nash liked to call the genius loci' (J. Piper cited in the exhibition catalogue, European Topography 1967-69, Oil paintings and gouaches, London, Marlborough Fine Art, 1969).

S.L.