art

A tiger in the castle

March 15, 2024 0 Comments
A tiger in the castle

Powis Castle is quite a frightening place.  A huge lump of sandstone glowering down on the Severn valley from its ridge, it was always intended to be intimidating, when it was first built by Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, a Welsh ally of the Normans, and later on when it was controlled by the powerful Herbert family.  […]

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Gustav Klimt’s ‘Schubert at the piano’

March 8, 2024 2 Comments
Gustav Klimt’s ‘Schubert at the piano’

Until it was mentioned on the radio the other day I’d never heard of ‘Schubert at the piano’, and apart from being fellow-Austrians I wouldn’t have thought that Gustav Klimt and Franz Schubert had much in common – one an extrovert artist fond of painterly extravagance, the other a reticent musician famously given to introspection […]

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Breaking up the Hannibal

February 9, 2024 5 Comments
Breaking up the Hannibal

Bruges may be his birthplace and where you’ll find his museum, but Swansea has a claim to be the second home of Frank Brangwyn, ever since his huge ‘British Empire’ panels were diverted from the House of Lords in London to Swansea’s Guildhall in 1933.  Today it’s possible to see Brangwyn’s visions of the fruits […]

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Late style and Glenys Cour

February 3, 2024 2 Comments
Late style and Glenys Cour

To mark Glenys Cour’s hundredth birthday the Mission Gallery is currently showing around thirty of her paintings, some oil on canvas, others oil on paper.  Most were painted in the last five years, so it’s a very different exhibition from the big retrospective in the Glynn Vivian in 2017, which looked back at over sixty […]

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Two architects of light

January 26, 2024 0 Comments
Two architects of light

Mention Sir Christopher Wren and most people will instantly think of St Paul’s Cathedral.  That includes Edmund Bentley, the inventor of the poetical form known, after his middle name, as the clerihew: Sir Christopher WrenSaid, ‘I am going to dine with some men.If anybody callsSay I am designing St. Paul’s.’ Last week we visited St […]

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Glenys Cour: can mlynedd o liw

January 12, 2024 1 Comment
Glenys Cour: can mlynedd o liw

Ar 6 Ionawr 2024 ymgasglodd cryn nifer o gyfeillion a chyd-artistiaid yn ei thŷ yn y Mwmbwls i ddathlu pen-blwydd Glenys Cour yn 100 mlwydd oed.  Eisteddai Glenys yn ei chadair arferol yn y lolfa, gyda’i golygfa wych dros Fae Abertawe, wrth i gyfeillion ddod ati fesul un, plygu drosodd neu benlinio, a dymuno’n dda […]

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Two Carmarthen portraits

December 1, 2023 4 Comments
Two Carmarthen portraits

In Carmarthenshire Museum in Abergwili are two portraits painted in 1850 in oil on board by an artist called David Patrick.  They don’t seem to have attracted much attention outside the Museum, except by Paul Joyner, but both possess a strange attraction, and deserve to be better known. Little is known about David Patrick.  He […]

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Celf gyfoes, heb gartref yng Nghymru

November 17, 2023 2 Comments
Celf gyfoes, heb gartref yng Nghymru

Arddangosfa eithriadol sy’n llenwi Oriel Gregynog yn Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru ar hyn o bryd.  Ei theitl yw ‘Cyfoes’, a’i hamcan yw dangos rhai i’r gweithiau celf – peintiadau a ffotograffau gan amlaf – y mae’r Llyfrgell wedi’u casglu yn ystod y degawdau diwethaf. Mae gwedd y sioe yn drawiadol.  Does dim gormod o weithiau, ac […]

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Ruin’d universes: the paintings of George Little

October 28, 2023 5 Comments
Ruin’d universes: the paintings of George Little

Long before all-year sea bathing became de rigueur with the middle classes of Mumbles, if you were up early enough, on any day of the week and at any time of the year, you’d be able to spot two figures in the waves on Caswell Bay.  One of them was George Little.  Born in 1927 […]

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‘Exhabiting that corricatore of a harss’: Anselm Kiefer and James Joyce

July 14, 2023 2 Comments
‘Exhabiting that corricatore of a harss’: Anselm Kiefer and James Joyce

No one could accuse Anselm Kiefer of being a miniaturist.  The White Cube in Bermondsey is a large space and it’s packed full with the huge displays of his new exhibition, a response to his long-time admiration for James Joyce’s unreadable masterwork, Finnegans wake. The Cube isn’t a cube at all, but an oblong.  When […]

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