Category: art
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Henry Holiday’s Boojum
Martin Gardner, in his annotated edition of Lewis Carroll’s comic poem The hunting of the Snark, includes all of the wood engraved illustrations made by Henry Holiday for the first edition in 1876. He also reproduces a drawing Holiday made for the book, but which never appeared – a picture of the Boojum, which makes…
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Llygad crwtyn, llygad dyn: David Jones yn Rhos
Dair wythnos yn ôl cerddais i heibio i gapel bychan S. Trillo yn Llandrillo-yn-Rhos, heb sylweddoli mai’r llecyn hwn oedd y cyflwyniad cyntaf i Gymru i’r bardd a’r artist David Jones. Daw’r wybodaeth hon mewn llyfr mawr newydd gan Thomas Dilworth sy’n dilyn bywyd a gwaith David Jones. Cymro oedd ei dad, Jim Jones, argraffydd…
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Roger Cecil
I met Roger Cecil just once, in 2011. There was only one way of making initial contact with him, according to my instructions, that had any chance of success. You rang his number, twice, then put the phone down and rang again. If you were lucky he would then answer. I was lucky, and arranged…
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Phil Eglin’s wobbly jugs
Haptic art is alive. Marcel Duchamp’s pale followers have failed, over the last hundred years, to snuff out the pleasure of making things with your hands. Squeezing red acrylic paint out of a tube and trailing it with a finger over a canvas still has irresistible appeal. So does mixing and shaping clay and hardening…
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Turner at Ewenny: a political artist?
Recently I’ve been looking into the strange fate of Ewenny Priory at the time of its dissolution in the 1530s and 1540s. Sooner or later anyone interested in the history of the priory can hardly escape an encounter with the remarkable watercolour of the church’s interior that JMW Turner painted in 1797, when he was…
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Are angels real?
Walking through Mumbles a few weeks ago I glanced up at the noticeboard on the Christadelphian ecclesia (Mount Zion Hall) advertising the topic for the next meeting. Normally the wording takes the form of ‘What does the Bible say about x?’, where ‘x’ is a current concern, like adultery or climate change or the colour purple. On…
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Glenys
There’s only one person in Swansea known by everyone as ‘Glenys’. And there couldn’t be a more popular or fitting choice for the Glynn Vivian’s first big exhibition after its five-year sleep than a retrospective of the works of Glenys Cour, born in 1924 and still painting daily at the age of 92. What’s more,…
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Paul Nash
The big Paul Nash exhibition now on at Tate Britain is a great show. Not just because it’s an unusually big and comprehensive review of his work, but because it raises so many interesting questions – about the part of an artist in homegrown and international traditions, about art’s relationship with the state in times…
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Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ezra Pound
It’s exactly a hundred years since John Lane published Ezra Pound’s ‘memoir’ of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in action at Neuville-Saint-Vaast on the Western Front on 5 June 1915, aged 23 years. I first came across Gaudier-Brzeska and his work as a student in the early 1970s. I’d got into the habit…
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Charles William Mansel Lewis, painter
Last week I paid a visit to Parc Howard Museum and Art Gallery in Llanelli. I was on a particular mission in the museum, but had time to look round the paintings on display. The collection is mixed but interesting. It includes an early view of Llanelli from Furnace Quarry by the town’s most famous…