Judy Cassab

Landscape - Australian art 60s exhib Abstract landscape painting female artist

1961

This superb vibrant British Abstract painting is by noted artist John Piper. It was painted 27th October 1965 at Mendham and is a watercolour and gouache composition. The stunning palette and brushwork make this a really colourful and engaging painting. It is in excellent condition as it is behind glass. A lovely example of Piper's work with echoes from the sixties. Signed lower right. Inscribed lower middle 'Mendham 27 X 65'. Provenance. Illustrated in black and white on the back cover of Marlborough/Aldeburgh Festival show catalogue 'John Piper, Suffolk Churches and Landscapes', 1966. Condition. Watercolour and gouache, 21 inches by 14 inches and in good condition. Frame. Housed in a generous surround float mounted frame and behind glass, 28 inches by 21 inches and in good condition. John Egerton Christmas Piper CH (1903-1992) was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows and both opera and theatre sets. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. He was educated at Epsom College and trained at the Richmond School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art in London. He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach, but often worked in several different styles throughout his career. Piper disliked the regime at the Royal College of Art and left in December 1929. Piper and his wife lived in Hammersmith and held a joint exhibition of their artworks at Heal's in London in 1931. Piper also wrote art and music reviews for several papers and magazines, notably The Nation and Athenaeum. One such review, of the artist Edward Wadsworth's work, led to an invitation from Ben Nicholson for Piper to join the Seven and Five Society of modern artists. In the following years Piper was involved in a wide variety of projects in several different media. As well as abstract paintings, he produced collages, often with the English landscape or seaside as the subject. He drew a series on Welsh nonconformist chapels, produced articles on English typography and made arts programmes for the BBC. He experimented with placing constructions of dowelling rods over the surface of his canvases and with using mixtures of sand and paint. With Myfanwy Evans, Piper founded the contemporary art journal Axis in January 1935. As the art critic for The Listener, through working on Axis and by his membership of the London Group and the Seven and Five Society, Piper was at the forefront of the modernist movement in Britain throughout the 1930s. In 1935 Piper and Evans began documenting Early English sculptures in British churches. Piper believed that Anglo-Saxon and Romanesque sculptures, as a popular art form, had parallels with contemporary art. Through Evans, Piper met John Betjeman in 1937 and Betjeman asked Piper to work on the Shell Guides he was editing. Piper wrote and illustrated the guide to Oxfordshire, focusing on rural churches. In March 1938 Stephen Spender asked Piper to design the sets for his production of Trial of a Judge. Piper's first one-man show in May 1938 included abstract paintings, collage landscapes and more conventional landscapes. His second in March 1940 at the Leicester Galleries, featuring several pictures of derelict ruins, was a sell-out. Piper had first met Myfanwy Evans in 1934 and early the next year, when his wife Eileen left him for another artist, Piper and Evans moved into an abandoned farmhouse at Fawley Bottom in the Chilterns near Henley-on-Thames. The farmhouse had no mains electricity, no mains water and no telephone connection. They married in 1937. They gradually converted the farm's outbuildings to studios for their artworks, but it was not until the 1960s that they could afford to modernise the property. Piper was an official war artist in World War II and his wartime depictions of bomb-damaged churches and landmarks, most notably those of Coventry Cathedral, made Piper a household name and led to his work being acquired by several public collections. Piper collaborated with many others, including the poets John Betjeman and Geoffrey Grigson on the Shell Guides, the potter Geoffrey Eastop...

This British abstract watercolour is by noted artist David Gwyther Irwin. Painted circa 1990 it is one of a series of paintings and is entitled Edge of the Universe. A superb paintin...

This British abstract watercolour is by noted artist David Gwyther Irwin. Painted circa 1990 it is one of a series of paintings and is entitled Edge of the Universe. A superb paintin...

This charming 19th century watercolour painting is of the promenade at Southport. Painted circa 1842 the view is of the original Victoria baths on the left, built 1839, then Victoria...

This beautiful Scottish Impressionist watercolour painting is by noted animal and horse painter Nathaniel Hughes John Baird. Painted circa 1900 it depicts a plough team and a farmer ...

This beautiful, atmospheric British 1920’s watercolour landscape painting is by noted artist Albert Goodwin. He was championed by famed art critic John Ruskin who took him on tour in...

Executed in 1950 during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and non-representational art, Feininger reduces a landscape to the bare minimums of lines and wash. Moeller Fine Art

Abstract cityscape watercolor with loosely defined landscape elements and geometric shapes by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 19...

Abstract watercolor with loosely defined landscape elements by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 1928-2009). From the estate of Les Anderson in Monterey, California. Signed on...

This later work by Lyonel Feininger approaches almost full abstraction. It was executed in 1950 at a crucial moment in American art history. Abstract Expressionism and non-representational art were in full gear and taking the world by storm. Yet Feininger who was associated with the German expressionist groups: Die Brücke...

Kenneth Rowntree Abstract Australian Landscape Watercolour 27.5 x 33cm Signed (top left) and dated ‘Kenneth Rowntree ’85’ Provenance: Anderson & Garland Studio sale of Kenneth Rowntree lot 263 Tuesday 8 September 2009 For biographical details and other works by Rowntree click here. Rowntree visited Australia in 1984/85. In this painting he picks up various vignettes from the Australian landscape in six separate blocks. Two relate to the sky, with almost-unbroken blue skies stretching from horizon to horizon, three relate to desert areas, with a whole array of different textures, and one is a luscious green. In one of the desert scenes he has picked out two road signs, in typical Rowntree fashion, reducing them to their simplest form. In her essay Kenneth Rowntree: A Strange Simplicity (published in Kenneth Rowntree A Centenary Exhibition Published by Moore-Gwyn Fine Art and Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, on behalf of the artist’s estate, on the occasion of the centenary of Kenneth Rowntree’s birth) Alexandra Harris makes reference to this painting noting: "Later, in 1986, just when the young David Hockney was collaging the signs and road-markings of Route 138 in Pearblossom Highway, Rowntree was in Australia painting yellow diamond-shaped road-signs as bright icons in open country. Wherever he went, Rowntree captured both the unfamiliarity of places and their relationship to things he knew. Heading into the Australian outback, he painted a road-sign as he would paint a rail signal at Clare in Suffolk or nautical markers at Swansea." Hockney’s 1986 Pearblossom Highway may be seen in the Getty and it is worth noting that Rowntree was in fact painting the yellow sign in 1985, so a year before Hockney. Kenneth Rowntree (1915-1997) Rowntree was born in Scarborough and educated in York where his father managed the local department store. Young Kenneth’s work was displayed there and his first major commission arose from an advertisement at the store. After the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford he studied at the Slade School, meeting Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden and then moving to north Essex to work with them as members of the group of Great Bardfield Artists. Between 1940 and 1943 he was one of the team of over 60 artists engaged by the War Artists Advisory Committee for the ‘Recording Britain’ project, to record the face of England and Wales before wartime action – or development – changed it for ever. Rowntree’s keen sense of design, and fascination with the quirky and the vernacular made him an ideal candidate to interpret our built heritage’s more unusual aspects. In 1951 he painted murals in the Lion and Unicorn pavilion for the Festival of Britain, he decorated the route of the Queen’s Coronation procession (some of the works being acquired by Her Majesty). During a teaching job at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford he was driven, perhaps by his experiences recording Britain, to record the decorated barges that belonged to the Oxford Colleges. These wooden Victorian ceremonial barges had belonged to the London livery companies, but were acquired in their later life by the Colleges to be used as changing rooms and clubhouses for the College boat clubs – depending on the size of the barge rowing eights were stored on board too. Part way through painting one of them Rowntree thought his drawing incorrect until he realised that it was the boat that was moving. It was in fact sinking. These days the Colleges have modern (but unromantic) boat houses; a handful of the barges remain – restored – in private hands. In 1959 he was appointed Professor of Fine Art at King’s College, Newcastle (latterly part of the University), which as British art schools went was one of the most progressive. The Master of Painting was the abstract constructionist Victor Passmore...

Colorful abstracted landscape of a garden porch in autumn with pumpkins by Les (Leslie Luverne) Anderson (American, 1928-2009). Signed "Les Anderson" lower right. Unframed. Image siz...