Travelling is for Peter Coker a necessary pleasure. Going away, he says, is salutary: it makes one reassess and wake up. When the opportunity came to act as steward for two years to the David Murray Scholarships, awarded for landscape painting, he welcomed the task because visiting students involved in the scheme took him to places he had never before seen. Even though still lifes, butcher's shops and other interior settings first made his name, landscape took over in the second half of the 1950s and has remained the dominant vein in his work ever since.

...

The works illustrated here concentrate on his production of landscape subjects in the hope of raising them from the obscurity into which theyhave fallen compared to another group of his works,'The Butcher's Shop'; paintings which guaranteed the critical attention lavished upon him nearly forty years ago.

At that time the grand but strident scale of the American Abstract Expressionists was virtually unseen this side of the Atlantic. When it received its first major showings at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1956 and 1959, it was to alter the entire climate of art appreciation in this country. During this period the priority for artist and art critic alike was centred on an assimilation of the alien American style painting and its tidy theoretical construction.

To review Coker's works of this same period is to see what the art loving public in this country rarely had the chance to see during that time - a Modern English artist in a European tradition owing a large debt to his French contemporaries. In concentrating on these works we have the opportunity both to place a higher value on, and to enjoy, the products of our own artistic culture and to watch their continuing creation.

 Foreword

Frances Spalding  Introduction

Frederick Gore  Peter Coker

       Colour Plates

Epping Forest

  1 Forest VI 1959

  2 Forest VIII 1959

  3 Forest IX 1959

France

 4 The Rock, Etretat 1955

 5 Tree and Hedge II 1956

 6 The Wave, Etretat 1956

 7 Bracken and Gorse, Audierne 1957

 8 The Lighthouse, Audierne 1957

 9 The Yellow Diving Board, Etretat 1957

10 Blue Black Interior, Bargemon 1979

11 Terrace, Le Vieux ChAReau, towards Claviers 1987

12 Landscape, Varengeville-sur-Mer 1989

Scotland

13 Mending Salmon Nets, Achiltibuie 1987

14 Salmon Nets 1988

15 Chrossavaig, Skye 1988

16 Badenscallie 1989

Black and White Illustrations and Catalogue of Works