Assignment 5 planning (part 2)

Following on from the previous post:

I have further investigated the work of John Piper, who came to prominence during WWII when he travelled the country painting our ‘war-torn’ cities. He had previously spent some 4 years as an abstract painter, but by his own admission, never got to grips with the “mystique of abstraction”. Nonetheless, this experience paid dividends when he was required to paint bombed out and semi-derelict buildings for the war office.

Pipers art was (is) very emotionally charged and he favoured buildings with extraordinary character that enabled him to paint them using his unique pictorial design in terms of colours, texture and illumination. Many of his paintings appear unfinished because of the way he ‘mixed’ very intricate building detail alongside blocks of colour lacking any detail at all.

Rievalux Abbey - painting by John Piper, courtesy of Rochdale Art and Heritage Centre

Image taken form the BBC website.

Rievalux Abbey - photograph entitled “Rievaulx Abbey – Rievaulx, North Yorkshire (EH)”

Image taken from the United Kingdom Tourist Information website.

He regularly painted using his own personal colour key and as a result it is often difficult to compare the object to the art. He also infused drama into his paintings by creating additional shadows and cragginess and regularly painting scenes as a night view, thus further enhancing the feeling of menace and destruction.

This method of representing what he saw was very powerful, primarily because the art required the viewer to compete the image – either to re-build the building using the blocks of colour he provided or to accept that the building was now a ghost.

For this last assignment I intend to investigate my local environment with a view to depicting it through a ‘Piper’ lens – highlighting what I consider to be the principal elements of structure, texture and illumination; whilst developing my own colour palate to communicate how I feel about the environment and in particular the scene I have photographed.