John Piper (artist)

===1930s===
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]]''.<ref name="Dark">{{cite web|url=https://artuk.org/discover/stories/john-piper-britain-through-a-glass-darkly|title=John Piper: Britain through a glass darkly|author=Peyton Skipworth|date=24 April 2019|website=[[Art UK]]|access-date=27 May 2020}}</ref>   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.<ref name="ODNBjp"/> In the following years Piper was involved in a wide variety of projects in several different media. As well as abstract paintings, he produced [[collage]]s, often with the English landscape or seaside as the subject.<ref name=Starfish>{{cite web |author=Tate|url=http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/piper-beach-with-starfish-t05030|title=Display caption: ''Beach with Starfish'' c.1933-34 |access-date=30 November 2017|work=[[Tate]]}}</ref> 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.<ref name=LCumming>{{cite web |author=Laura Cumming |author-link=Laura Cumming |url=https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/nov/19/john-piper-surrealism-in-egypt-tate-liverpool-review|title=John Piper; Surrealism in Egypt: Art et Liberte 1938-48 - review |date=19 November 2017|access-date=30 November 2017|work=The Observer}}</ref>

With [[Myfanwy Evans]], Piper founded the contemporary art journal ''[[Axis (magazine)|Axis]]'' in January 1935.<ref name="Dark"/> As the art critic for ''[[The Listener (magazine)|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.<ref name="vanRaay">{{cite book|author1=Stefan van Raay |author2=Frances Guy |author3=Simon Martin |author4=Andrew Churchill |publisher=Scala Publishers|year=2004|title=Modern British Art at Pallant House Gallery|isbn=1857593316}}</ref> In 1935 Piper and Evans began documenting [[Early English Period|Early English]] sculptures in British churches. Piper believed that Anglo-Saxon and [[Romanesque art|Romanesque]] sculptures, as a popular art form, had parallels with contemporary art.<ref name="vanRaay"/> 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.<ref name="ODNBjp"/>

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.<ref name="DFJenkins">{{cite book|author=David Fraser Jenkins & Hugh Fowler-Wright|publisher=Unicorn & The Portland Gallery|year=2016|title= The Art of John Piper|isbn=9781910787052}}</ref>