Piers, a Shropshire-born lad, acquired a love of drawing and painting in early childhood scooter-ing about in Constable-like countryside of south-west Salop. He thought it not unusual to throw up if he had to wait some hours before painting or drawing when he was 16!
After formal art training - Byam Shaw, R A Schools, Islington etching studio, all in London - he travelled alone and painted extensively in Europe and for a month in s-east Africa, before settling in his adopted, equally landlocked North Yorkshire in 1975.
Wensleydale, especially from a height affords amazing panoramic, unspoilt vistas, and these never tired to be a major influence upon Piers’ life and work.
Essaouira on the more southern coast of Morocco has inspired Dawn acrylics and Oils and he longed for a show of work done there. It was The provençal Alpes-Maritime country which inspired 40 etchings for a book.
Piers was an ardent colourist (see on his www under foreign seas the Nov 2019 Moroccan w-colour-acrylics) and this combination for capturing light with free brushwork's or palette knife's panache produced many exceptional oils and etchings, some regularly hung at the R A Summer show.
From etchings & paintings in early days of Shropshire, then the continuing Wensley...and Swaledale work, to the Lake District and then 167 exceptional trees from all over the UK and Eire, to PB's novella "La Route.des Violettes" set in the foothills of Provence's Alpes Maritime around Tourettes sur Loup near Vence which is well above Nice on the s-east corner of Provence below the Alpes Maritime...
Overwhelmingly the desire to capture the beauty of Nature, and sometimes animals and, at rare times, people in the scenery, drove Piers on. He was amazed at our fragile but abundantly beautiful planet's loveliness held in space amongst a vast firmament and, being both a Christian, an ardent GREENPEACE founder-member from 1972 and once an EARTHWATCH water sampler, it is land and seascapes from where his life's work was 'mined'.
Though he has always painted in oils, Royal Academician artists Diana Armfield and her late, great husband Bernard Dunstan wrote:
"We both admire the wonderful intensity of Piers' vision, and in some of his oils, the handling, the rythmn of the paint marks, make for a strange beauty all of their own......and his etchings are superb."
Laurie MacLaren who used to run Highgate Contemporary Art and promote Piers' paintings, once said in 2013:
"Piers always paints with fervour conveying with force and extreme care what he truly loves".
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT NOTE for patrons of so called ORIGINAL PRINTS - prints Piers makes by hand:
Piers was renowned as a Printmaker of ORIGINAL etchings having worked onto VIRGIN METAL by etching into the plates the lines and tones, and, also by hand, inking up the hand inked-up blacks and mainly COLOURS...the printing alone being a v lengthy process sometimes.
But, over the last decade, THERE IS MORE THAN a bit of a confusion over the term "Limited edition Giclee print” to the buying public.
By casual deceit, a photographed painting or drawing or watercolour (whatever two-dimensional artwork) can be signed and numbered, then beautifully framed and passed over to people as a “Limited Edition’ print!
It is often exactly the same price as a totally hand-made, truly growing in value, non-photographed "Limited Edition, Original print".
The public are often convinced this giclee print is ‘original' when only the signature is original! PB and all printmakers have no objection if printed on the giclee's front is: 'This is photographically reproduced from an Original Work'. But they don't. So buying a photographed work of say an OIL painting at almost or even the same price as an 'original' numbered original handmade print is madness, no less than a ‘con’ as the public are being sold what is a photo, a Reproduction sold in a glamourous frame at exorbitant prices and most likely because the word ‘Giclee’ sounds glamourously to authenticate a truly ‘Original Print’ when it’s not handmade and thus hardly ‘original’, is really misleading a gullible the public. In PB's experience when he asked gallery staff why the sell these reproductions called giclees at an original's price, the gallery staff couldn’t reply! - or say 'they're v popular so we rely on on 'giclees' to survive as a gallery by their sales!" That really must confuse the art buying public keen to have something of value in their homes! A Giclee print is a fancy frenchified word for a Reproduction, worth and worth just the value of the artist's signature and the minimal cost of its photographically reproduced printing by a Printer. It does not having the genuine emboss of say an etching or the 'live' artist's oil or waterbased ink of an etching or lithographo that is run through a Press having had each one inked by hand, printed by hand and signed to say genuine, etc etc. Would Picasso have signed reproductions and go on to make these photos to survive? That is that is what they are even if made to look like they're all slightly different in a hand-printed, numbered edition - as lithographs, etchings, drypoints and engravings, monoprints,woodcuts and wood engravings are.
Almost too late to say CAVEAT EMPTOR but don't spend more that a fiver on a giclee!