Tag: Welsh painting
Kenneth Rowntree paints Wales
In 1940 the government commissioned around sixty artists to record local scenes all over Britain, in order to capture a visual record of the country’s buildings and landscapes before they were transformed by the effects and aftereffects of war. The scheme, labelled ‘Recording Britain’, became a home equivalent of the war artists scheme set up […]
Two versions of Ceridwen
Christopher Williams is little known today outside his home town of Maesteg, but in his heyday – he was born in 1873 and died in 1934 – he was regarded as the outstanding painter of Wales. He earned his living mainly by painting portraits. Among his subjects were many of the Welsh public figures of […]
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 […]
Welsh paintings: gwallter’s top 10
Paintings, not painters, you’ll notice. And the artists are all safely dead (this avoids treading on the toes of the living). Third, I wouldn’t claim that these are the best ten paintings. They’re just works that have given me special pleasure and contemplation. Many aren’t very well known. But see what you think about my […]
Thomas Jones’s ‘A wall in Naples’
This week Patrick McGuinness reminded his Twitter followers of a two-part poem he published in his 2004 collection The Canals of Mars, called ‘Two paintings by Thomas Jones’. The first part, ‘A wall in Naples’, goes like this: I look and look until the nothing that I seeperfects itself. I perfect its lack of interest,as […]
Cefn Bryn and the painters
Looking out of the window of my lockdown attic, I’ve a south-west view of south Gower. If I stretch my neck I can see the eastern end of the ridge of Cefn Bryn, the long sandstone backbone of the peninsula. All through the bright days of April the sun has set, often spectacularly, on one […]