Tag: Swansea
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? […]
Wales Coast Path, day 13: Swansea to Mumbles
This may be Day 13 in the geographical series, but chronologically it’s number 95 – Sunday 9 September 2018, and the very last stage of our Wales Coast Path journey. We‘ve left our ‘home stretch’, one of the flattest in the whole course of the Path, till last. It’s a route – along the track […]
Men come together to make a man
I was wandering absently through the galleries of the Glynn Vivian the other day, trying, unsuccessfully, to remember what the Welsh word for ‘unflattering’ might be, when I stopped suddenly in front of a Japanese print. It was in one of the rooms devoted to the gallery’s founding collection, which once belonged to Richard Glynn […]
Frank Brangwyn’s British Empire Panels
1 Introduction Most Swansea people are familiar with the British Empire Panels. Many sitting through a dull patch in a concert in the Brangwyn Hall will have turned to ponder Frank Brangwyn’s enormous work. In a few months’ time the Panels will get more exposure, as Marc Rees’s performance piece Nawr yr arwr / Now […]
Swansea’s rebel women
For all their strengths in the campaign to gain votes for women Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were by nature autocratic. In 1907 some members of their Women’s Social and Political Union took exception to their announcement that the WSPU’s annual conference would be cancelled in future and that they themselves and their inner circle would […]
Carys Evans and her women
Just over a year since her last solo show in Swansea Carys Evans has another, in the Kooywood Gallery in Cardiff. Again there are around forty paintings – large and small, on canvas and board, in oils, mixed media and pastel. A dominant theme runs through many of them – the lives of women. Not […]
Boy in a window
An old, long-abandoned factory in Swansea’s Strand. It has two storeys, a stone wall at its base and a corrugated roof. Below, the windows are boarded or blacked out. Upstairs, where ragged glass hangs in the smashed panes, one window frame’s open. At its base a round-faced young boy, with dark hair and jug ears, […]
Broke down engine blues
The story that follows isn’t unusual, or dramatic, or life-changing. But it says something about the country we now live in, and what an historically abnormal attitude we have towards it. I needed to go to London for the day for a meeting. The train left Swansea on time at 8:29am, and most of the […]
George Ace, pioneer cyclist
Wandering among the memory theatres of Wales over the last year or two I’ve come across some fine institutions, some striking objects and some remarkable characters. In Tenby Museum they remember the happily named George Ace, a distinguished figure from the heroic days of cycling. George Ace was born in 1861 and came from Swansea. […]
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 […]
