Peter Collyer (born Northampton, 28 November 1952) is a British artist and author.
His odyssey around Britain's surrounding seas to paint the sea areas and coastal stations of the Shipping Forecast for his first book Rain Later, Good brought him to a wide audience, with several television appearances, numerous interviews on local radio stations and with Libby Purves on BBC Radio 4's Midweek programme.
Rain Later, Good was adopted by the RNLI as the publication to celebrate their 175th anniversary and they continue to receive a royalty from sales. His third book, Encompassing Britain, is being sold in support of the National Trust's Neptune Coastline Campaign.
He became well known through his paintings of the chalk downland of his adopted county, Wiltshire. Since painting a series of pictures along the Dorset coastal footpath for his first London one-man exhibition in 1990 the coastline has been his preoccupation.
Libby Purves writes in her foreword to Encompassing Britain: ...he is not only a marvellous, delicate draughtsman and watercolourist...but a dryly observant writer and amateur naturalist. To chronicle the sea-coast appears to be his chosen life's work, and we should be grateful.
Collyer paints small watercolours of shimmering intensity. His subject is the landscape of the British Isles. He describes his work as a 'pursuit of the history of the landscape, its shaping by man and nature, the working and weathering of the land and its endless interaction with the sea'.
His fourth and latest book is Offshore, his personal view of a selection of Britain's islands.
Peter Collyer is a Brother of the Art Workers Guild and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He lives in Calne, Wiltshire.
Bibliography edit
- Offshore: An Artist’s view of Britain’s Islands (2005)
- Encompassing Britain: Painting at the Points of the Compass (2002)
- South by Southwest: Painting the Channel Islands (2000)
- Rain Later, Good: Illustrating the Shipping Forecast (1998)