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Creative driving force
Beautiful handmade books that have been a decade or more in the making mark the stages of Piers Browne's life. Michael Hickling reports.
On a rocky track high in Wensleydale a man in a flat cap emerges through a curtain of drizzle pushing an ancient green wheelbarrow. It's lined with old concrete and dead leaves. On top, face side up, is his latest oil painting, ready framed.
Piers Browne is making his way down from his studio around which live his animals – two pedigree pigs, two donkeys, two horses and two sheep.
His home is perched on the hillside not far below. Piers has been here for over 30 years and from this eyrie he draws together the views of the artist, the writer and the musician. You can add one other talent to that. Before reaching his front door, you pass another workshop where Piers makes his books, printing and binding the old fashioned way. He describes them as catalogues of his life's work, each one chronicling a private journey. Some have been 15 years in the making and they are now on show at the Hield Gallery at Bishop Monkton with some of his other work.
The rain came on more heavily and the spectacular expanse of Wensleydale beyond the edge of his lawn was obscured by mist. The summer's dampness has not clouded his enthusiasm for living here. "Wensleydale has the most amazing graceful, silvery light with incredible panoramas. Every day brings something unexpected. I am constantly inspired by dawn or dusk. There are not enough hours in the day. Sometimes I do five paintings before I eat in the mornings."
On his way home from a drive to Kent via Malton, the sight of a tree prompted him to jump out of his car and get his easel out, ringing home to say to put the evenings's domestic plans on hold. Why? "It's difficult to say. It's like going for a brisk swim when I really want to go to bed. I'm always trying to prove myself."
He is a driven man. In the kitchen, his conversation swoops bird-like in one direction and then shoots off in another. Whatever the hour, his clock on the wall always strikes seven. It's all slightly disconcerting.
Having many things on the go at once is how he likes it. The workaholic ethic seems to have been inherited from his father, a mining engineer turned businessman, who played a big part in framing the post-war nationalisation plan for the coal industry.
The family lived in some style near Ironbridge in Shropshire. "I was born on a velvet cushion – I've always appreciated it." Piers's mother was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and it was a sombre home after she died.
They had a ballroom with a vaulted roof where Piers started to paint as a 16 year-old. During emotionally fraught times there was a book he would turn to for solace, AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad, a special favourite of the family's.
"I realised I could illustrate this," says Piers and this project absorbed his anxieties. "I had an energetic father, I was the black sheep of the family who wanted to paint. Dad lost concentration on me when mum died, the book kept me on the rails." The original took him 10 years. A mass edition hardback was published with a foreword by Kinglsey Amis.
He studied art and printmaking in London and took the paternal hint to leave home, living in Italy for a time often in little cafs. "Every Friday I drew in the caf – it got people in, especially in Venice."
The remote house above Wensleydale had been discovered in 1929 by his father when he was studying mining engineering at Cambridge and he
made a trip up here with a university don.
Browne senior bought it in 1944 for 700 and Piers arrived to live here fulltime in 1975. "I drove up in my Mini van and I did this place up – we worked till 2pm and then off to the pub until three in the morning."
He had started making money from his art in 1969, thanks to the boss of an engineering company, FH Lloyd of Wolverhampton. He saw a large painting Piers had done of Ironbridge and said, "I'll give you 50 if we can use it on our calendars." After winning a landscape prize, Piers was commissioned to do portraits for Tate and Lyle. "I had a really commercial attitude. I follow what Picasso said: 'sell everything you've got – and you'll do better new work'."
Having shared his life with A Shropshire Lad for more than a decade, did he relate to its author AE Housman? "Housman was a loner who craved fame and was difficult with people. He was not 'easy'. The older I get, the easier I get."
For his publishing set-up, he bought up the contents of little local printing works that were going out of business. "Every village used to have people handsetting type." John Milner, a printer from Richmond, came over every Friday in his Hillman Imp to help with the typesetting.
Sir John Mortimer is a fan of Piers's work and the writer contributed a foreword to another book featuring the poems of William Wordsworth which recently sold in London for 10,000. Prince Charles did the foreword to his book The Glorious Trees of Great Britain – a collaboration with Professor David Bellamy.
The death of Piers's first wife Charlotte from breast cancer heralded another difficult time. He is now happily married again but in between came an intense two-year relationship that went wrong.
He has since turned that experience to creative use in another book, Sonnets for a Siren – comprising 27 poems and 21 etchings. The Bodleian Library at Oxford and Cambridge University Library have both bought copies bound with silver-tooled calfskin.
It's unusual that pictures and poems are created by the same hand and the Bodleian suggested a parallel with William Blake. Piers picks up a volume of Blake from a table and studies the images doubtfully. "I can't stand his work."
Hunting for something in his living room, he's distracted by another on-going project and sits down at his Bluthner grand piano and starts to sing 'My true love hath my heart, and I have his...'. The words are The Bargain by the Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney, for which Piers has composed some agreeable Sting-like music. He also put his Sonnets for a Siren to music and published those as a limited-edition CD. He used to have a band that recorded rock albums (music and lyrics Piers Browne).
He doesn't really fit a category. He's a practical conservationist and founder member of Greenpeace and set against the image of the free-thinking artist is the fact that he was a church warden at St Oswald's, Askrigg, and is still involved in the organisation of services there.
"I believe, like Czanne, that there's a religious basis for good creativity. Rejoice in what you see. The artist is doing what God wanted."
We climb the slippery track up to the studio and in the adjacent field the monumental shape of Bludgeon, a wild boar-cross looms into view out of the drizzling murk to say hello. His consort, a Gloucester old Spot called Boadicea-Eliza, tags along behind looking hungry. She is not much smaller and may be pregnant.
A graceful black and white gipsy stallion sticks its nose inquiringly over a stone wall. For the moment, Nutmeg and Rummy (the two donkeys) and Coletski and Lambski, the sheep, are keeping out of the way.
The studio has underfloor heating (switched off) but there's another ingenious central heating wheeze – a large bale of hay from a nearby field that also serves as a table top. When it arrives it gives out a substantial amount of heat for no input.
There are numerous works in hand here. "If I can keep quiet for four years and finish the projects I'm on, I'll be a happy man." He remains behind to get on with them.
Piers Browne's exhibition runs until the end of October at the Hield Gallery, Bishop Monkton, open Tues-Sat 10.30am-5pm. Next Thursday, October 30, (10am-5pm) he is giving an all-day printing demonstration at the gallery. Tel 01765 677362.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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