gwallter

  • In the huge and magnificent William Blake exhibition now on in Tate Britain there are many images that were new to me, even though I’d seen the earlier big Tate shows of his artistic work, in 1978 and 2000.  One…

  • In the big show of Swansea-themed art currently on in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery are three paintings from the permanent collection I’d not seen before.  They’re by a Czech artist called Ernst (later Ernest) Neuschul.  What intrigued me was…

  • Ffordd ddigon cyffredin o ganmol llyfr yw dweud pethau fel ‘allwn i ddim ei roi i lawr tan y diwedd’, neu ‘darllenais i’r nofel hon mewn prynhawn, roedd hi mor afaelgar’.  Nid felly y darllenais i Gwirionedd, nofel gyntaf Elinor…

  • These are dark times.  Walking through the streets of central Swansea, it can seem that the dark is rising.  More shops close with every month, leaving empty and boarded windows.  In some parts only charity, pawn and vape shops appear…

  • At the weekend we crossed the border to stay with friends in Winchester for a couple of days.  Winchester has a good claim to be called the heart of England.  It was the capital of Alfred the Great, and remained…

  • The National Museum in Cardiff is currently showing a generous selection of the portraits of August Sander, possibly the best-known large series of photographs produced in the first half of the twentieth century.  It’s hard to explain how it feels…

  • At the centre of ‘The curious moaning of Kenfig Burrows’, Sophy Rickett’s collection of photographs in the Glynn Vivian Art Galley, is Cupid, a seventeenth century oil painting from the Gallery’s foundation collection.  It’s safe to say that this work…

  • Television is scared stiff of books.  It’s different on the radio, and it used to be different on television in the distant past – remember Melvyn Bragg’s excellent Read all about it In the 1970s? – but those who decide…

  • Greening cities and towns, we might imagine, is a contemporary concern – a response to the realisation that we’re rapidly destroying the earth’s environment and depleting its non-human lifeforms.  Swansea has its share of green activists and agitators working to…

  • If you visit the Penllergare Valley Woods, as we did last week, you can’t leave without developing a strong respect for the estate’s chief creator, John Dillwyn Llewelyn.  Photographic pioneer, astronomer, botanist, orchid collector, landscapist, inventor – he used his…

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