Piper pullovers and sketchbooks

Eye and Camera, Plate II, 1983

After visiting my mother and celebrating her 90th birthday, it's back home to Kent, a weekend of hacking back the jungle (at least the weather was superb), then to the Tate Archive today. I got through 52 of the 58 Piper sketchbooks and notebooks in the collection before they closed for the day, looking for relevant images which we could film. What struck me most forcibly was that our whole premise for the film is that Piper lived in a romantic unpopulated dream-like landscape and we've waited patiently at venues until people have moved out of the way - and yet his sketchbooks from 1968 onwards become almost exclusively figure studies - mainly recumbent half dressed women with black stockings but also crossed legs with lace up boots, hand studies, copulating couples and 3 somes, together with photographs from life and lots of images from magazines of models. I get the feeling he preferred a rounder type of female. Studies for the Eye and the Camera series I suppose, but even so rather a plethora.

I enjoyed the comments Piper wrote about the Sitwells:

'I was an extremely late developer. Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell really (what you might call) brought me up. That is, they made me believe in a life I had always wanted to live but which, until I met them, I hadn't thought was possible ... they 'sophisticated' me.'
Edith was, apparently, an inveterate knitter and made at least 3 pullovers for Piper.

The next couple of days I must get my stained glass lecture finalised, then the 2 day conference is Thursday/Friday. Meanwhile Charles dashed off to Wales on Sunday to film the brilliant Welsh potter Phil Rogers opening his kiln Monday - this is the final piece for the film commissioned by Goldmark Gallery (see http://www.philrogerspottery.com/). He then has a guest Thursday to Monday, Jobear returning Tuesday to Friday. No rest for the wicked.