From
Outside the House of God - an interview with the artist John Knapp-Fisher
by Damian Walford Davies, in Planet 131:

Your studio/gallery here at Trevigan Cottage, Croes-goch, a few miles north of St David's in Pembrokeshire, has also been your home for over thirty years. Could you describe the current selling collection hanging out there in a gallery that is also your front room?

I suppose at the moment it is a sort of winter collection, a sort of holding show for several months. In summer the selection tends to change fairly rapidly because if I sell a painting I replace it with another, whereas now, nothing is selling, so I've simply got something for people to look at when they do take the trouble to come round. Because people don't necessarily want to buy. When I go to an exhibition, I very seldom buy. This is not an entirely commercial enterprise, of course; it is also about people wanting to see one's work. This means I occasionally put things in the winter collection I don't particularly want to sell at all. But on the whole everything that goes into the gallery is eventually going to be for sale.

...Your style is in fact extremely varied, as are your subjects and the geography of those subjects. But as you've said, people tend to associate you with a certain kind of picture. To put it reductively, the quintessential John Knapp-Fisher painting is a Pembrokeshire cottage, farm, or church appearing luminously against a dark landscape.

That's what people want, there's no doubt about it. Although some people will say, "Oh, why does he always paint these dark, gloomy night pictures? What about our beautiful sunlit Pembrokeshire?" You always get that. But I'm certainly known for my dark and light paintings, which I've done for forty years. The first one was done in Margate in Kent in 1959 - it was a ruined cottage, and I called it Condemned Cottage . I got this idea then because I was working in the theatre, so I was interested in the effects of light. I'd also done this rather boring picture of Margate Church and I decided to eliminate fifty per cent of it, which gave me this idea of putting in less. This has been the aim of so many of my pictures. It's quite a simple procedure really. The picture of a South African landscape hanging above you there that was done in the evening when the hills were in silhouette. Most of the detail was eliminated and you actually get the impressive effect you see there. That's what I'm interested in, whether I'm doing a group of Welsh farm buildings or a range of South African mountains. And the light in Pembrokeshire does have this strange, shifting quality to it.

...After so many years here, you're known very much as a Pembrokeshire artist. Is there a feeling of a School here, and if so, what is your place in it?

This is something that been questioned, of course - is there such a thing as Pembrokeshire Art or Welsh Art ? People speak of The Cornish School but I don't think such a thing really exists here, although I've apparently had some sort of influence on people who work in Pembrokeshire. Some would claim to have been influenced by me sometimes in a not very positive way and I, too, get influenced, of course. One is necessarily influenced by everything that goes on. It's all been thrown into the pot rather like that stew we've just been eating. You don't really think about it. You just eat it.