Clifford Fishwick’s busy life encompassed the professional and the recreational in equal measure - often the two merged or overlapped. A prolific painter operating on the cusp between directly perceived or memorized landscape and a more independent studio-based painterly abstraction, Fishwick also found time to raise a large family, run a major West Country art school - he was Principal of Exeter College of Art between 1958 and retirement from teaching in 1984 - and engage his passions for exploring nature through regular hiking, climbing and yachting expeditions. Liverpool-trained, Fishwick engaged intimately and physically with the landscape of Devon and Cornwall - as well as further afield when tackling the Alps, Dolomites or Scottish Highlands with climbing boots in hand - with the result that his semi- abstracted landscape pictures often resembled the work of St Ives colleagues and friends like Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Trevor Bell, and Karl Weschke. He exhibited alongside these at the Penwith Society and also became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists. Isolated Peak is a typical early 1960’s picture and represents, in the shrowdy, dimly-coloured tones of dusk, the peaks that he sometimes observed in fleeting plein aire watercolour sketches or else negotiated on rigorous trekking trips. The wash studies were aide memoire for later pictures like the present example produced in his Topsham studio, near Exeter. Fishwick enjoyed scumbling and a rapid, summarizing paint treatment that created both earthy texture and a convincing equivalent for the fugitive light and capricious weather conditions of the great outdoors. Isolated Peak could be an observation of the Bristol Channel island Lundy, where Fishwick spent much time climbing with the writer Al Alvarez and others during the 1960’s or else is a peak encountered on walks in Derbyshire, western Scotland or on Dartmoor.
35.5 x 46 cms (13.95 x 18.08 in)
P.O.A.