Introduction

Piers Sanders grew up surrounded by art, his mother Paule Sanders was a noted sculptor. On a trip to Florence with his mother at the age of 16 he saw a painting by Boccaccio and thought 'I can do that' and thereafter his life was all about art. He trained as a painter at Camberwell College of Arts where notable contemporaries were actor Tim Roth, Sarah Raphael a noted portrait painter (who also died tragically young in 2001), Catherine Goodman who won the BP Portrait Award in 2002, and his lifelong friend Richard Lewsey who was selected for 2015 USIA Top Artist. He was the kind of student who went his own way rather than trying to please his tutors. Carel Weight (Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art) was very keen on Piers' work when he saw his degree show at Camberwell and his work was included in 'What They Showed' 1982 – the best of the graduate work of that year.

He painted many portraits of family and friends and other subjects that meant a lot to him – landscapes in the Fens and in Suffolk – domestic objects - and produced a number of drypoint prints and etchings. It was the drypoint prints which attracted the most attention from leading figures in the art world when he exhibited them in the Eastern Open exhibitions at Kings Lynn art centre.

His abstract paintings mainly date from after the death of his father, for whom he had been the main carer, in 2000. He moved to Northumberland with his partner in 2009 and continued working there producing a number of abstract paintings and prints as well as one local landscape.