Author Archive: Andrew Green
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. […]
Some books I read in 2023
It’s been a writing year rather than a reading one, but as usual I’ve found so much to enjoy in books, many of them happened on by accident, often in charity shops. The book club I belong to also threw up plenty of good reads, including the best novel I’ve read this year, Claire Keegan’s […]
Return the Red Lady
Languish is the right word. In a corner of a remote museum there languish some ancient human bones. They were discovered by William Buckland in 1823 in Paviland, or Goat’s Hole, one of the many caves that punctuate the limestone cliffs on the south coast of Gower. The bones belonged to the person who became […]
Desperate causes: Tristram’s unorthodox circumcision
The early life of Tristram Shandy is marked by a series of unhappy accidents. His conception is badly planned, thanks to an untimely question asked by his mother. At his birth his nose is broken by Dr Slop, the inept man-midwife. And he’s given the wrong forename, after the name his father has chosen gets […]
Books of poems: gwallter’s top 10
For want of shelf space, I’m having to lay new books horizontally, on top of earlier books. They threaten to warp and then turn solid, like sedimentary rocks. Soon I’ll need to have another cull. I doubt, though, whether the censor will make much of an impression on the three-shelf-long poetry collection. Books of poems […]
