P
eter Kiernan was born in 1925 in Yorkshire on the edge of Wharfedale and he grew up east of Leeds on the edge of the Vale of York. As a small boy he started drawing and painting and he never stopped. It came naturally but he was also in the right place, born into a writing and painting family. His mother, Katharine Sternberg, was an oil painter, much given to working out-of-doors. Her brother, William, was an admired Wharfedale watercolourist. Their uncle, Frank Sternberg, was a painter-etcher, member of the RWS and RA exhibitor.
Kiernan particularly likes painting in watercolour because, he says, "It travels at lightning speed and seems to have its own brain and sensitivity; trying to control that fires an extra intensity of looking and perception.”
In his hands, marks and colour and representation itself are held in dynamic tension, each element insisting on its own reality. "The descriptive element acts simply as a carrier of the aesthetic essence of the landscape or person," says Kiernan. For Kiernan, drawing is a form of thinking and exploring; simple in its means, but for that very reason providing an intellectual discipline and formal challenge.
Pastel has found its way increasingly into his repertoire, perhaps because of the closeness of drawing and painting in his work. Many of his watercolours start out as brush drawings. In pastel, to move from coloured line to mass and tone is natural, physically and aesthetically.
Peter has now settled in Dorset, a place with some of the wildness and mystery of his native Yorkshire. He has created substantial bodies of work in Buckinghamshire, London, Suffolk, France and Spain, as well as Dorset.