Archive for 2024
Swansea’s golden age of innovation
After five years of labour our baby was born last week. It weighed in at a whopping 1.88 kilograms and almost 600 pages. Its many parents are rightly proud of it. You’ll have guessed by now that it’s a big book. Entitled Swansea’s Royal Institution and Wales’s first museum, it will stand for many years […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Six Ways
When I was a small boy there were certain places outside Hoylandswaine, the village where we lived, that I always thought of as my own, special spaces. They were nowhere in particular – a corner where two roads met, or a pondside, or a patch in the woodland that spread from the bottom of our […]
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 […]
Why is the Welsh Government at war with culture?
In December 2023 the Welsh Government published its draft budget for 2024-25, a ‘budget to protect the services which matter most to you’. As expected, the overall budget is seriously inadequate, thanks to the Westminster Government’s economic incompetence and its determination to impose Austerity Mark II on public services in advance of pre-election tax cuts. […]