Tag: Swansea
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 […]
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 […]
Ruin’d universes: the paintings of George Little
Long before all-year sea bathing became de rigueur with the middle classes of Mumbles, if you were up early enough, on any day of the week and at any time of the year, you’d be able to spot two figures in the waves on Caswell Bay. One of them was George Little. Born in 1927 […]
How to destroy a bus service
Cars and other private vehicles worsen global heating, endanger our bodies and health, poison our air and wreck our neighbourhoods. Yet, instead of trying to encourage us to make less use of them, governments in the UK are busy doing the very opposite. The UK government, cynically and absurdly, even declares that it’s fighting a […]
Coffee shops: gwallter’s top 10
As pubs have closed, so coffee shops have multiplied. This must surely be a progressive social trend, at a time when most social trends are depressing. Making a coffee at home, if you have the right equipment, has its advantages, and even adventures (our Gaggia Brera has a mind of its own and from time […]
A port painter
The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery has got into the excellent habit of displaying a good mix of works from its permanent collection along a long wall in one of its upstairs rooms. This has the advantage of letting us see paintings that would not otherwise often see the light of day. When I was there […]
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 […]
Mysteries of Paraclete
Five minutes’ walk away, where Summerland Lane reduces to a narrow neck of tarmac to meet Newton Road, is Paraclete Chapel. In every respect it’s unremarkable, except for one thing, its highly unusual name. Till recently I’ve not thought much about the word ‘paraclete’, beyond knowing that it was vaguely connected with the Holy Spirit. […]
Swansea and Chile: exploitation, sanctuary, fulfilment
The Glynn Vivian has a show of work from its collection on the theme ‘art and industry’. It’s full of wonderful and thought-provoking things: well-known paintings as well as much less familiar items on paper and in other media. A whole wall is taken up with Josef Herman’s massive ‘Miners’ oil painting of 1951, surely […]