‘Faith & Art: The Life and Work of Joseph Pighills’ (2022) is a biography of the artist, Joseph (Joe) Pighills (1901 -1984), born into a working class family and who lived all his life at Marsh, a hamlet near Oxenhope, West Yorkshire.
Joe left school at 14 and started work as an apprentice pattern maker. However, he was also a largely self-taught artist who gradually gained a strong following for his landscape paintings. Toward the end of his life, collectors would make their way to his home to buy paintings directly from him, or join a queue for early admittance to his solo exhibitions. Yet his strong Methodist faith (and his wife, Mary) kept his ego firmly in its place – the belief that ‘pride comes before a fall’ was never far from his mind.
He captured the wild beauty of the moorland above Haworth, and he saw in his work the opportunity to both fulfil his own painting talent, as well to express his faith in a tangible way. The landscape, for Joe, was a sublime, ever-lasting, unchanging tribute to God, and he spent the twenty years after his early retirement tirelessly sketching and painting the scenes quite literally on his doorstep.
The book has been written with the cooperation and support of John Pighills, son of the artist. Soft covers, p.24, A4 size, with 30+ illustrations, mostly in colour. Price £6.50 including postage
This is the seventh book in the Not Just Hockney series, and all profits go to support the now community managed Silden Town Hall, the major cultural centre for the town.
To buy a copy of the book, Click here