Tag: artists

Francis Place, pioneer artist and potter

January 6, 2023 4 Comments
Francis Place, pioneer artist and potter

In the late seventeenth century York was a lively intellectual centre.  The York Virtuosi – modesty was not one of their features – were a group of scientists, historians and artists including the zoologist Martin Lister, the antiquarian and historian of Leeds Ralph Thoresby and the glass painter Henry Gyles.  Another member was a pioneering […]

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Why isn’t visual art a big thing in Wales?

March 3, 2019 3 Comments
Why isn’t visual art a big thing in Wales?

How healthy are the visual arts in Wales?  Not just in the sense of how many or how good are the artists, but other, more contextual questions, such as:  How are they valued?   How are they supported?  How are artists encouraged and trained?  How are the arts used to bring new life to depressed communities?  […]

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Sitting for Bernard

November 12, 2017 0 Comments
Sitting for Bernard

For over forty years, and with increased energy since 1990, Bernard Mitchell has been collecting people.  The people are artists and writers working in Wales, and his means of collecting them is the camera lens.  Many people have seen parts of his great project, the Wales Arts Archive, over the years.  In the 1990s the […]

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Esther Grainger

September 3, 2016 7 Comments
Esther Grainger

We’re in Merthyr Tydfil to spend an afternoon in Cyfarthfa Castle and its estate, above the town to the north-east.  The house was built as a home by the Crawshay family, owners of one of the town’s great ironworks in the nineteenth century.  ‘Castle’ is the right word for it.  Stone turreted and battlemented, it […]

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Swansea art now

July 23, 2016 2 Comments
Swansea art now

Set alongside Cardiff, its ancient rival, Swansea wins no prizes.  Or so it seems. Political and financial power has long been concentrated in the capital.  Cardiff’s economic magnet increases its force year by year.  As a shopping centre Swansea has steadily lost ground – even Carmarthen has more to offer these days.  Jobs tend to […]

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‘Sweet sister death has gone debauched today’: artists and writers in Mametz Wood

April 13, 2014 7 Comments
‘Sweet sister death has gone debauched today’: artists and writers in Mametz Wood

Mametz Wood: three syllables that have lost none of their power to appal, after almost a hundred years. On 7 July 1916 the infantrymen of the 38th or Welsh Division, most of them volunteers and amateur soldiers, were ordered to make a frontal assault on a German-held line in front of a wood, roughly a […]

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