UO art museum exhibits silkscreen prints by John Piper

The UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is showing a special exhibit of two bodies of work by British artist John Piper, a prominent artist who used a silkscreen printing process made popular by the Pop Art movement.

The exhibit, “John Piper: Eye and Camera & Travel Notes,” is on view in the MacKinnon Gallery of European Art through Oct. 12.

In his early career, Piper experimented with abstraction before settling on representational art as his subject matter. Not only is he well known for producing some of Britain’s most loved paintings, prints and photographs of the 20th century, Piper also designed fabrics, stained glass windows and stage sets for theatrical productions.

He also wrote poetry and non-fiction, including illustrated texts of his travels throughout the English countryside. Two of the prints on view are from Piper’s “Travel Notes” series.

The works on display are collaboration between Piper and master printmaker Chris Prater of Kelpra Studio in London. Although Piper employed various forms of printmaking, he preferred screenprinting, which involves running an inked squeegee over the stenciled area of a stretched fabric screen, transferring pigment onto the desired areas to form the image.

This method was especially useful to him when combining photographic and drawn material. He used this technique in the “Eye and Camera” series, for which is his wife, Myfanwy Evans Piper, posed

The works on view in “John Piper: Eye and Camera & Travel Notes” were donated to the museum in 1979 by Dr. Lewis Burrows.

―From Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art