Visions of the Valleys

The Valleys of South Wales have a unique visual drama.

I know of no other landscape

where urban fingers press so deeply

and closely into a wild,

rugged upland.

These valleys have inspired artists for more than two centuries.

First they were attracted by the natural wilderness,

but soon it was industry that fuelled their artistic imagination.

Here was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

And artists came here to record these extraordinary scenes.

But artists didn't just portray the power of industry.

They also showed the struggles of the people who worked within it.

This was the world that I was born into

and which formed me politically,

as I became first a union official,

and then a local Member of Parliament and Government Minister.

But this place also inspired me to go to art college

and dream of following in the footsteps of these artists.

I'm going to look at how artists

have described the Valleys for 250 years.

But I also want to ask

if they're trapped in a past so powerful

that it's difficult to throw off.

Very few artists

describe the Valleys as they are now.

That story doesn't have the brutal romance

of a coalfield wracked with danger, disease...

resilience and struggle.

This isn't what you think of as the Valleys,

but this is what first drew artists here 250 years ago.

This is the Vale of Neath

with its wooded valleys and its waterfalls.

It's a real beauty spot,

as it was in the late 18th century

when artists journeyed hundreds of miles

to come here and paint its unspoilt landscape.

Industry was already present.

There were ironworks and foundries tucked into the Valleys.

But that wasn't what attracted artists.

They came here for this wilderness.

Towards the end of the 18th century,

artists did start travelling to the South Wales Valleys,

particularly in the 1790s.

One very famous artist came - that was of course Turner.

So Turner came here from London?

-He...

-That must've been quite a journey.

It was an epic journey in those days before trains.

He had to travel on horseback, on foot, by boat,

carrying a large sketchbook, a small sketchbook,

his painting box, his bag.

He was a young man and he was a very intrepid spirit, very adventurous.

And he set off in the summers on these trips that would last weeks.

And if you think of it,

these are places...they were uncharted territory for him.

So in Turner's day,

the Valleys were a kind of frontier?

You would say that. It was before the Valleys had actually felt

the full impact of the Industrial Revolution.

But for him I think it was the nature,

this very awe-inspiring nature that drew him here, that inspired him.

So this must've been the spot he painted this from.

I would say that he painted this on this very spot, yes.

Why would he have come here? He couldn't go to Europe?

There were the French revolutionary wars in Europe,

so artists couldn't travel to Europe.

He'd studied at the Royal Academy from the age of 15.

He was a landscape artist - he needed source material.

If you were a young artist in London

and wanted a wide range of landscapes,

be it picturesque or wild and sublime like this,

Wales was a good place for him to come.

So for him, he was seeking maybe the extreme in nature,

what we'd call the sublime landscape that fills you with awe,

that fills you with fear and admiration at the same time.

And I think under this thundering waterfall,

he certainly would've found that.

The waterfalls that inspired Turner

also powered the ironworks and foundries

that were springing up around here.

And as the 19th century dawned,

artists became less concerned with the spectacle of nature

and more interested in the drama of industry...

..with skies blackened by smoke from the furnaces.

Artists weren't separate from these new industries

but also worked in them.

Thomas Hornor was a land surveyor who also painted

the estates of the Valleys' ironmasters.

Two of his key works are kept in the National Museum in Cardiff.

Beth, what have we got here?

Well, we've got this rather extraordinary work

by the artist Thomas Hornor, that came out of an album.

And this page is actually hinged and it would've, in the book,

opened up to reveal this extraordinary image below -

this wonderful vision of the Valley of Neath.

As you can see, as well as depicting the landscape,

we have this wonderful kind of orchestra of angels up in the sky.

But at the same time as he was inventing these visions,

he was also painting the new industry of the Valleys.

Yeah. So the book is actually a tour, where you go through the valley

and, as part of that tour,

he visits some sites of industry.

So again we can compare that work with this work

which is further up, taken from Merthyr.

And this is the Penydarren Ironworks,

very dramatically lit.

And he has chosen to do it at night-time so he can accentuate

all the fire and the industry to make it much more dramatic.

So, yeah, you can see really

a progression from painting the landscape to actually

artists becoming fascinated by

the vibrancy of the industry that was happening.

So you've got two landowners, essentially,

commissioning Thomas Hornor to paint what they're proud of.

Somebody wanting to paint this beautiful Vale of Neath

and you've got another landowner who wanted to show off

this cutting-edge industry - the new blast furnaces and rolling mills.

Yeah. So they're showing, you know, the land that

they're developing and their houses but they're also showing the industry

and how they're making their money.

The richest of the ironmasters were the Crawshay family.

With the millions they made, the Crawshays built this mansion -

Cyfarthfa Castle in Merthyr - to keep an eye on their empire.

It still has the feeling of new money -

showing off its power to the neighbours

and to the people who did the work for them.

Generations of Crawshays stared down from these walls.

They were stern industrialists who ruled with a will of iron.

But the most impressive paintings here

are on a much less grand scale.

What have we got here?

This is a watercolour of Cyfarthfa Ironworks

by Penry Williams.

He was commissioned by William Crawshay II

the ironmaster, around about 1824-25 -

when the castle was built -

a series of watercolours to be given as a birthday present

to his second wife, Isabel Crawshay.

And so you can see the ironworks here,

all the work going on,

the workers in the foreground as well,

and the engine houses in the back.

-And this mass of smoke and flames going everywhere.

-Yeah,

you can imagine the smog lighting up the sky and the smell.

You just get a feeling of it from the painting itself.

You must've been able to see Merthyr from many miles away.

Yeah, miles away. When it was night-time, you would've been

able to see big, orange flames up in the night sky.

Why would Crawshay have wanted this to be painted?

There's very few pictures done in the 1820s.

Obviously this is before photography as well.

I think it was to show off his wealth and his status, really.

He would've commissioned Penry Williams

to do these and all of the others.

That's right, cos he'd spotted his talent early on.

Penry Williams had been here with his father.

His father was a painter and a stonemason.

And Penry came along on one of his jobs

and he was sketching one day.

This is reputedly.

William Crawshay II saw his talent

and along with John Josiah Guest - Dowlais ironmaster -

they both made sure that they patronised him

to go to the Royal Academy

to develop his skills further.

And because they needed somebody, didn't they,

-to record these great works...

-Exactly.

..and this wealth and status that they had?

Exactly. Local boy made good.

This is one of the most famous images

-of the Industrial Revolution.

-That's right.

Yeah, these very rare images of actually the work going on inside

one of these rolling mills. It's a very unique image.

You can only imagine the heat, the noise, the smell as well.

-The scale is huge, isn't it?

-Yeah.

And you can actually see what the men are doing here.

So Penry Williams, the artist,

he must've been very familiar with the work that the men did.

He probably would've been very friendly with them and known them

as well, cos he was from the poor side of the tracks, as they say.

That's actually the castle in the background,

looking down very imperiously towards the ironworks.

So William Crawshay could very easily see what was going on

in the ironworks just down below.

The workers must've been very pleased,

seeing that HUGE castle up there(!)

It's really rubbing these people's noses in it, isn't it?

-Yes, I can imagine.

-This vast house

which would cost millions to build now.

All the money made out of this,

this enterprise here, the labour of these people

who would've looked up and seen this very, very grand house -

-one of the grandest houses in Wales...

-That's right.

-..lit up in the night...

-Exactly.

..when they were living in one-up one-down.

Living in one-up one-down and working in very hard conditions.

Crawshay and his fellow iron barons amassed huge wealth

and created temples to industry.

In the middle of another Penry Williams painting

are the extraordinary Bute Ironworks in the Rhymney Valley.

An amazing building with chimneys

inspired by the Dendera Temple of the Upper Nile.

Just think - an Egyptian temple in the South Wales Valleys!

There's nothing left of the Egyptian extravaganza

and many of the old ironworks are ruins now...

arches and towers that only hint at

the power and noise they once generated.

Tucked away in a scrap yard is an old factory

that doesn't look much now, but was once an industrial marvel.

By the middle of the 19th century, South Wales was fast becoming

the engine room of Britain's Industrial Revolution.

Ironworks and coalmines

were springing up right across the Valleys.

It's difficult to imagine the scale of these works now.

Only ruins remain.

The Crawshays' tin-plate works, just outside Treforest,

is one of the most complete.

It's still in the metal business, but selling scrap now.

When it was built in 1835,

it was the largest tin-plate works in the world,

supplying metal across the Empire

and also to the USA.

Like the ironworks in Merthyr, it was recorded in popular prints,

but there's one important thing missing from them.

Being in this extraordinary building,

you can see why artists were so attracted

to the new industrial enterprises -

the ironworks and the foundries and the tinworks.

I mean, look at this picture.

The drama of that light coming out of the blast furnaces in the night.

The people - the men and women who made the wealth -

they're very small,

very difficult to see them.

But there is one collection of paintings

where you can actually see their faces.

A series of remarkable portraits of the men

who worked in the Treforest factory has recently come to light.

These 16 tiny paintings, now at the National Museum in Cardiff,

give us a glimpse of the early industrial workers.

Beth, these are very unusual paintings, aren't they,

from the mid-1830s?

Yes. They're a wonderful group that we have.

We have a selection here - there are in fact 16.

They're all paintings showing the workers of Francis Crawshay.

And they're all shown in this very distinctive style

set in a landscape mainly with a sky behind.

And we think they're by the artist William Jones Chapman -

he's an artisan artist - but they're only attributed to him at the moment.

They're all named and identified. So we have some skilled workers,

we have some unskilled workers,

we have managers. And they're quite extraordinary because they show them,

as you can see, as individuals.

And he captures the character and the facial features of each worker.

No women, I should mention as well, in the group -

all 16 are male workers.

-This is a manager here.

-Yes, this is John Davies. He's the tin manager.

And I think you can see the difference really with the clothes.

He's obviously not hands-on.

You can feel him as a person, I think that comes across very much,

and that's quite unusual for workers to be depicted in this way.

Oh, yeah, great care has been taken.

The faces have been beautifully painted

-and very sympathetically painted, haven't they?

-Yes.

They're all identified as well. So we know, for instance,

that this is William James and that he was a roller.

He's here, pictured with the tools of his trade.

So, you know, he's taking pride in his job.

It gives him real dignity, which is quite right, of course,

because these were the people who created the wealth.

Indeed. They were very important to the owners.

They needed their workers to continue to make the money.

But these portraits only tell half the story.

Conditions in the Crawshays' iron and tin-plate works

were harsh and dangerous.

Just four years before they were painted,

the workers were pushed to breaking point.

This is one of the bedrooms of Cyfarthfa Castle -

the former mansion of the Crawshays.

They weren't popular.

In 1831, the workers of Merthyr rose up

against the poverty and starvation they were suffering.

The red flag was unfurled for the first time.

The rising was put down brutally.

And one man, Dic Penderyn,

was taken to Cardiff and hanged -

allegedly because he was the leader of the rising.

At the time, there was no visual record of the Merthyr Rising

or of the conditions the workers were protesting about.

The iron barons didn't want the hard reality

of industrial South Wales to be seen.

Occasionally, artists did look at the ordinary people of the Valleys.

Tip girls were paid to carry coal

and ashes from the iron foundries.

And Thomas probably wanted to...

portray the harshness of their lives.

But this is such a romantic image

that she might've been carrying a Greek urn.

But historian Elin Jones has her own theory about the painting.

The title "Sackcloth and Ashes",

I thought it referred to the shame of these women

earning their bread by the sweat of their brow.

But in fact it refers to society's shame

that women are still earning their living in this way,

comparatively late in the 19th century.

And when this was painted,

would it have been commissioned to make that message?

I don't know. Was it commissioned

or was it the artist painted it himself?

He was a very evangelical Christian

with strong views about the role of women in society,

and he did think it was shameful

that women be employed in hard labour outside the home.

So it's quite possible that he was inspired,

trained by the classical images,

but portraying what he thought was a social problem

of society not giving women

their proper place and their proper dignity.

Recently a collection of portraits

has emerged from the shadows of history

that show women in the Valleys as they really were.

This time through a new medium - photography.

Elin, who are these photographs of exactly?

These are photographs, taken in about 1865,

of women in the ironworks in Tredegar.

Taken by a local photographer.

And what is special about these pictures

is that they are very, very rare.

There aren't very many pictures of workers.

There are very few pictures of women workers taken, it seems,

some of them actually in the works.

This one seems to have a stone wall behind her.

Some of them seem to be more shot in a studio, like this one here.

But they are very immediate,

they are very detailed,

and show us all the sort of sense of hard labour

that these women were doing. These women were working

in physical work in the ironworks.

How would people in 1865 have felt about women working in ironworks,

and coalmines, and so on?

They would probably have been viewed as rough, tough women.

"Common" as my grandmother would say.

She was born in 1878 and she'd a very strong view about common women.

She would've been shocked, for example,

to see these women wearing trousers.

-That is very rare.

-A shocking image!

Shocking, shocking image

because they are wearing trousers that show their...

well, the shape of their legs above the knee, Kim!

Above the knee.

And they're wearing these aprons.

These people were really the lowest of the low.

These women workers in Tredegar

were part of a massive social change in the Valleys.

The mines, and the ironworks,

and the railways were hungry for workers.

And the massive inward migration

transformed these valleys

and created this now famous iconography

of rows of terraced houses

stacked up the hillsides,

squeezed between the mines at the bottom of the Valleys

and the wildernesses on the top.

But the life for this new population was grim,

with tens of thousands squeezed into rapidly built pit villages,

working underground in coalmines fraught with danger.

There emerged a passion for change

and the people who came to work in the Valleys

were amongst the most radicalised in the world.

Coming from across Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom,

they soon joined together in chapels and trade unions.

At the heart of every community

was the Welfare Hall or Miners' Institute.

The coal industry was booming

but wages and conditions weren't improving.

Workers organised themselves into trade unions,

and buildings like this

were raised by subscription from their meagre earnings.

But life in these tough Valleys communities

wasn't portrayed by painters.

The art that celebrated the coming of industry to the Valleys

didn't show the realities of life there.

The only pictorial record of this time

is in newspaper and magazine illustrations

often showing the aftermath of the all too frequent

pit disasters.

But one pioneering cartoonist in Wales

gives a remarkable insight

into how these turbulent times

were represented in the popular press.

His name - Joseph Morewood Staniforth.

So, Chris, what is this book of cartoons?

Well, JM Staniforth was the cartoonist

for the Western Mail and the Evening Express,

in Cardiff,

and he drew cartoons throughout the six-month dispute in 1898.

At the end of it, the Western Mail

published them as a separate pamphlet for thruppence.

So these are really the only visual record of a very important strike.

Yeah. I mean, this is pre-photography in newspapers.

So you've got people who are sketch artists,

and then you've got these cartoons which are acts of interpretation.

Every day, he is drawing something, following the dispute's progress,

responding to the things that are cropping up and the changing public

attitudes around the positions of the miners and the mine owners.

But as the politics of the coalfield changes,

so does Staniforth's depiction of South Wales coal miners.

It does. What you have here, 1898,

you have a collier who is respectable,

solid, hard-working, knows his place in society.

Somebody who's deserving of some measure of respect.

Later on - we've got one here 11 years on -

you've got a collier who is much less comfortable.

He is threatening, he's more animalistic.

And I think that transition

represents increasing concern on the part of the cartoonist

and possibly, therefore, by society at large,

over what was happening in the coalfield.

And how many people would have seen these images?

The Western Mail's got a circulation of approaching 100,000 at this time.

He was also drawing for the News Of The World,

so he was reaching possibly over a million people

by the early 20th century.

And, in a way, that's how South Wales got known, then?

Yeah, South Wales was, of course,

the home of the South Wales coal industry, it was the hub of the...

you know, the economic hub of the British Empire, as it were.

It powered the Royal Navy.

All of Britain's greatness could be predicated

on what was going on in South Wales.

So, these cartoons must have been one of the ways

in which people actually discovered the Valleys.

I suppose so,

because people didn't travel to the Valleys as tourist areas.

These were places of some mystery,

didn't necessarily encounter miners going about their daily business.

There were relatively few photographs of works of art

that represented the mining valleys.

Cartoons, however, were appearing in daily newspapers

and conveying something through imagery

of what these societies were like.

Another glimpse of the protests in the Valleys

from the early years of the 20th century

comes from an extraordinary set of photographs.

A photographer in Tonypandy, Levi Ladd,

took pictures of striking miners meeting there in 1910,

just before their violent confrontation with the police.

The fragile glass plate negatives were mostly lost,

but a handful have survived

and give us a vivid image of the politics of this time.

The years around the First World War

saw peak production in the South Wales coalfield.

Out of the tens of thousands of people working,

there emerged a new generation of artists.

For the first time since Penry Williams in Merthyr,

they'd grown up alongside the colliers and their families.

Trained at Swansea School of Art,

they brought a new realism to the portrayal of this industrial world.

Evan Walters was the oldest, and in the 1920s and early 1930s

he painted a series of images of coal miners

that still impress today.

Not widely known, they're rare portraits of working men,

painted with a deep understanding of who they were

and the conditions they faced.

The portraits date from the year of the general strike onwards.

They show men pinched by hunger

as the Great Depression brought desperate poverty to the Valleys.

Chris, after the First World War, of course, the coal industry crashed.

-Yeah.

-The demand for coal is dropping dramatically.

Yeah, particularly in South Wales.

You've got new industries like oil and electricity coming through.

You've got a lot of competition in the export market,

and so South Wales coal,

which had been really, you know, top quality, is now struggling.

It's high price and they're finding it difficult to shift.

What that means is that you get mines beginning to close

and large numbers of miners being laid off.

And within ten years, you know,

you're looking at a really serious unemployment problem in South Wales.

But it's also the time, isn't it,

when artists start to try to reflect this pain in their own work?

Well, you've got an artist like Evan Walters, for instance,

who starts to paint portraits

in the South Wales coalfield in the mid-1920s.

So, this is at a point

when the industry is really struggling for its very existence

and so are the communities.

You know, you've got the general strike,

you've got the seven-month-long lock-out of 1926.

And then widespread unemployment comes hard on the heels of that.

And what you've got with those portraits are real miners.

These are real people living in South Wales

who've experienced that kind of human tragedy.

You know, their whole raison d'etre has disappeared

because the industry has shrunk

and they no longer have the means of making a living.

And I think you can see that the tragedy, it's written in the art.

These people are real examples of this economic catastrophe.

And artists weren't just painting portraits.

-They were also painting the reality of mining.

-Yeah.

I mean, somebody like Vincent Evans,

the paintings that he does of miners underground, working,

you get a real strong sense of the physicality of that labour.

It's not brought out in any other way at that time, I think,

except perhaps through works of literature

like George Orwell's Road To Wigan Pier.

You get a sense of the muscles,

the sweat, the pain, the claustrophobic environment.

So, for miners in work, the work itself hadn't changed very much

from the late Victorian, Edwardian period.

And that's captured in those paintings.

And were those paintings regarded

as proper things to go into art galleries at the time?

Well, I think there's a struggle there.

You know, in a sense, industrial art is still trying to find its way

in the artistic environment of the early 20th century.

And that's why so many of these painters have to find other subjects

to make their careers through.

These were hard years in the South Wales Valleys,

with colliery closures, mass unemployment and near starvation.

Few pictures show this,

but a painting by another Swansea student,

Archie Rhys Griffiths, catches the mood.

Griffiths has his blackened automatons approaching the viewer

from a valley whose hills are more grey than green,

beneath a sky that promises bad weather.

Radicalism and socialism continued to grow.

Mardy, at the head of the Rhondda Valley,

was dubbed Little Moscow in 1930.

Evan Walters' painting The Communist,

depicts this political world.

Here's the orator decked out in a bright red shirt,

exhorting the masses to revolution.

Walters never wrote about this painting,

so we don't know if it's in support of the communist

or if it's supposed to be satirising him.

Those paintings of the 1920s and '30s

became symbols of the struggle

against the worst aspects of capitalism.

They attracted to the Valleys artists, writers and film-makers

who took those images out to the wider world.

Two European artists came to the Valleys during the war

and were highly influential.

Both were Jewish.

Josef Herman from Poland.

And Heinz Koppel from Germany.

They never met, even though they worked at the same time.

One promoted an image of the dignified miner.

The second helped usher in the idea

of the Valleys as an imaginative dreamscape.

Josef Herman became celebrated for his portraits of Welsh miners.

He was inspired by a vision of men

returning home from the pit in Ystradgynlais

silhouetted against the sunset.

Herman lived in the village

and went underground to sketch the men at work.

His fame grew

after he painted a huge mural of miners

for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

These sculpted figures, influenced by African carvings,

became some of the best known images of the Welsh Valleys.

I think for Josef Herman, coal mining was...

what he referred to as dignified labour.

You know, he saw it as being

real men's work,

producing something real that was a commodity

that was going to get sold

And it was hard labour.

And there was something that he really valued in that.

He'd grown up in a Warsaw ghetto

with his whole family living in one room

and his father working as a cobbler.

This was a completely different idea,

that you'd see these miners coming out of the sunset

and crossing the bridge and going off down the pit.

And he saw the sort of masculinity and the power of that,

but he also saw it in a slightly romantic way

as the wealth being brought up from under the earth.

The fires being burnt with it.

You know, it's something about nature being expressed.

Rock underneath our feet being brought to the surface.

So, there was a sort of timeless energy

that he felt was in that whole story.

He was deeply moved

by the quality he found in that community and the landscape,

and desperately wanted to start painting it,

and stayed for a decade.

Heinz Koppel lived in Dowlais near Merthyr

and while he was less well known than Herman,

his influence on art in the Valleys was also profound.

He was teaching unemployed miners, kids,

anybody who wanted to come along

and see what they'd make

of this new style of painting that he was teaching,

this sort of self-expression.

And the students at Cardiff College of Art who lived in the Rhondda

and went down on the train every day,

the Rhondda Group, as they became known,

they all found out about him and they went up to see him.

And their experience of sort of suddenly coming across somebody

that they regarded as a real artist,

who'd got a real set of enquiries about how to paint,

really excited them.

These are artists who are finding new ways of seeing the world.

They're not just regurgitating the same kind of landscape view,

a little still life, you know, some safe scene.

They are saying, "How do we see the world?

"What can we do differently from people in the past?"

One of the things that Heinz Koppel used to say to his students is,

"How would a child see it?

"Try and see it absolutely from basics.

"Try and go back to basics in what you do."

And people need help to go back to basics sometimes,

and both Herman and Koppel, I think,

were seen as people who could help throw out

some of the baggage of art and start fresh.

Josef Herman's paintings of miners

reflected a new confidence in the post-war years.

These men were no longer the downtrodden figures

of Evan Walters and Archie Rhys Griffiths,

but symbols of a new world.

Everything changed in 1945. A Labour Government was elected.

The mines were nationalised. The NHS was created.

Even old pits like this one in this banner of Mardy,

these were rebuilt, reconstructed.

There was a tremendous new sense of optimism in the Valleys.

When I grew up in the Valleys in the 1950s,

there was full employment

and a tremendous sense of optimism everywhere.

We were open to all kinds of influences.

We were reading the novels of Jack Kerouac

and looking at abstract expressionist painters in America

like Jackson Pollock.

And there were young artists in these communities in this valley,

and they were trying to reflect the world around them.

But they were painting in a new way.

Young Valleys artists

like Ernest Zobole, Robert Thomas and Charles Burton

were part of this post-war generation

entering art college for the first time.

They no longer painted scenes of industry

but streets brimming with shoppers, lively paintings in bright colours.

Gwyn Evans is one of the last survivors of this group.

Well, it is optimistic.

Of course, it coincided

with us younger people who, naturally, would have optimism.

We were going to change the world.

But that air of optimism was strong.

We never thought of ourselves as making history.

We were just a group of committed people

and one thing we wanted to do was paint.

We revelled in the sort of whole atmosphere of the Rhondda.

It was in our bones.

Every stone glowed, and it drove us on to paint and record what we saw.

Because a lot of the art that was being produced

was like a sophisticated art, whereas ours was raw.

We went out and we met on a Saturday morning

and we did different areas of the Rhondda.

One morning, we'd meet in Treherbert.

It might be below freezing.

I can remember sitting in a stream, my feet on the blocks of ice,

and drawing away.

And then we'd retire to a cafe -

Dom's was the favourite in Treorchy -

and discuss what we'd done.

And it was usually quite a serious hour or two.

People were looking to the future, they were looking to make a new world

after that Labour Government

really turned so many things upside down and said,

"Let's start again in a different way."

And I think that if you look at those paintings by Charles Burton,

the early Ernie Zobole paintings,

the Glyn Morgan, too,

they're expressing quite an optimistic view of the Valleys.

You know, you're seeing tidy places

in both senses of the word.

You're seeing order

and attractive rural landscapes around the community.

And, really, that was the truth that people were seeing around them.

They weren't seeing poverty and destitution,

which might well have been the picture

had they been painting in the '30s.

They were seeing a regulated, harmonious world.

It wasn't only men who grasped the possibility of the new age.

Nan Youngman, an English artist and teacher,

set up a scheme to show art in Welsh schools,

and painted a series of evocative streetscapes.

Cardiff-born Esther Grainger

was also inspired by the landscape and its people,

painting this austere portrait of a miner's wife,

Con Morgan, in the 1950s.

Perhaps the most singular vision of the Valleys came from Ernest Zobole.

The son of Italian immigrants,

he went to art college after national service.

But the Valleys, and specifically Ystrad Rhondda and Penrhys,

became his artistic universe.

When he went away to teach in North Wales in the mid-1950s,

he struggled to paint,

needing the landscape of his home to spur him on.

As his work matured, Zobole created his own iconography of the Valleys.

Often seen at night, his paintings show streets and houses

clinging to the sides of the hills,

streetlamps and car headlights illuminating this nocturnal world

with the artist himself looking on.

I think all of those artists who came from the Valleys

saw it as important to show their own home and express that.

And they were in love with their own home,

and I think that comes through very strongly

in the warmth of the paintings.

Koppel and Herman, they were in love with it as well,

but even coming as outsiders, yes,

they did really express their feelings for the places they were.

When you look at the geography of it

and the amazing placing together of rows and rows of houses,

with mountains behind them,

you know, it was an amazing picture,

and so many artists coming together here

just found it a place full of visual excitement.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, the Valleys faced grimmer realities.

The Aberfan disaster of 1966,

when a coal tip collapsed on top of a primary school,

killing 116 children and 28 adults,

was like a curse that returned,

a ghost from earlier in the century

when accidents were tragically common.

The disaster was commemorated in this painting by Nicholas Evans.

Evans was a kind of Valleys Grandma Moses,

who only took up painting in his 60s

and whose work of monochrome miners

captures the gloom and desperation of his youth underground.

His Aberfan painting

gets something of the grief that followed this terrible tragedy.

If the bright new future of the post-war era was fading,

the mystique of the mines continued to draw artists

like moths to the flame of a miner's lamp.

Valerie Ganz is a Swansea painter,

and although the Valleys were just a few miles away,

they remained a hidden world to her

until she began sketching there in the mid-1980s.

Now, these sketchbooks are so wonderful.

When did you first go down a mine?

I think it was about 1982, and I worked in a private mine,

a drift mine.

Was it the sculptural qualities, the drama,

the special light that attracted you to the mines?

I don't really know.

It was the fact that it was almost like a forbidden place,

and I've always wanted to go to places I'm not supposed to go to.

Of course, you went to the most forbidden place for a woman.

-Oh, yes.

-And that's into the baths where the men were actually washing.

I mean, you've got the wet skin, the white tiles and the reflections

and colours of the towels and things.

It was a beautiful subject.

These are incredible life drawings.

-But, I mean, there are full frontals in here, Valerie.

-Oh, yes.

-And the men didn't mind?

-No.

-Not at all?

-No.

It says something about coal miners in South Wales, doesn't it?

Well, I mean, I'm so used to drawing people without their clothes on

that it didn't make any difference.

In fact, I was in the little road next to the mine one day

and along came a lorry,

and the men called out to me and I answered.

But I didn't recognise him.

He said, "Ah, you don't know me with my clothes on!"

HE LAUGHS

Great!

You actually went to live, of course, in a mining community,

-right next to the mine in Abertillery.

-I did.

And how did you begin to paint that?

How did you get that sense of community?

How do you translate that onto a canvas?

Observation and sketchbooks.

And I'd go to their choir practice

and their band practice and snooker halls and so forth,

and they were very happy to let me do what I liked.

They were really good about it,

and, as much as one was able to,

I became part of that community,

and they were really welcoming.

It was a lovely atmosphere.

But the world that Valerie Ganz painted was soon to change.

The long post-war boom ended for the Valleys in the late 1970s.

The demand for coal and steel

began to decline catastrophically.

The coal industry was heading for a momentous strike.

I was working for the National Union of Mineworkers

during the 1984-1985 strike.

It's an experience etched on my memory,

but little-recorded by artists.

Photography and film are the main documents of the time.

All of these images and posters,

these were all designed during the miners' strike of 1984-1985,

by the miners - in fact, I designed some of them myself.

But, you know, the extraordinary thing is

that there was very little art

created by artists about the strike at the time.

But there was a rich vein of creativity

that came after the strike.

The end of the strike in 1985

saw the rapid closure of the coal mines and steelworks

which had defined the Valleys

for so many people for so long.

30 years later, little remains

of these industrial powerhouses.

Tower Colliery at Hirwaun was one of the last,

taken over by the miners

and staying open until 2008.

It remains empty and decaying,

a memory of generations of men who worked underground.

Hidden away, there's a mural by one of the miners themselves -

an anonymous personal statement

about 150 years of work at the site.

But the passing of these industries

has inspired some artists

who find subject matter in the struggles of the past.

Various artists in different ways

have shown the Valleys emerging from the closure of the mines.

David Carpanini was born here in Blaengwynfi in the Afan Valley,

north of Port Talbot.

For 50 years, he's been portraying the people of this village

as stubborn survivors.

This picture is very important to you, isn't it?

Well, indeed. As a subject

it's something that has recurred many times in my work.

It contains the house where I grew up

from the age of nine months,

and the path here

behind that building,

I walked many, many times,

and it is a dramatic view,

it is an extraordinary visual pattern

of folding forms and rhythms

that I saw almost every day of my life.

Clearly, things have changed over 50 years,

but nonetheless, it was a dynamic,

recurring, powerful symbol

of a working, dynamic community.

And it's firmly embedded in my psyche,

I don't think there's any question about that.

Clearly, I'm also doing a good deal of work,

in more recent times, from my memory

because, as you can see, it has changed quite significantly.

But the excitement of one's engagement, from a child,

with the experience of growing up here,

I once described as like growing up

in a fine Renaissance city, like Florence.

Clearly, I don't have a Piero della Francesca in my local church,

but I did have, every day of my life,

a changing visual spectacle

that I have constantly found

extraordinarily stimulating.

-And you've never forgotten the people, have you?

-No, no.

Well, again, that's the other issue as well.

Although much of my work is about pure landscape,

the majority of my work

is about people in situations.

And they are, as I've heard you say before, survivors.

They're very resilient people,

and often you find the situation where people are...

I hope this comes across in some of my paintings...

They're not just about South Wales,

they are about...

a broader perspective of human experience,

where anyone, in difficult circumstances,

has found a way to survive.

David Garner also deals in the fallout from the pit closures.

The son of a miner,

he uses the remnants of industry to make art -

miners' boots, donkey jackets are his raw materials.

All of this stuff is about coal mining.

Why do you produce art about coal mining?

Well, it's the background I came from, you know.

My dad was a miner for 50 years

and I grew up in a mining... Community mining village,

in a place called Aberbargoed.

Came out of college, Royal College,

and straight into the miners' strike, '84-'85 miners' strike,

and started to produce work which reflected what was going on.

Now, this piece here is an incredibly...

intensely personal piece of work,

because this is about your dad, isn't it?

Yeah, this is very personal.

My dad died of pneumoconiosis

and I made this piece when he died.

It's called Do Not Go Gentle,

which is an obvious reference to the Dylan Thomas poem.

That fight for life,

and also that fight for recognition and compensation

for the cause of death.

And that X-ray is actually his X-ray

that you got from the hospital.

It's an X-ray from Caerphilly Miners',

which I eventually managed to get from them.

They were very reluctant to release it,

but, yes, it's the actual X-ray, yeah.

And this is actually his jacket?

The majority of the work I make which incorporates found objects,

they have to be authentic, they have to be the real thing.

There's kind of no compromise there at all.

So, you know, the jacket is his, the X-ray is his.

-And his nebuliser.

-The nebuliser, yeah.

That authenticity is so important, really.

And this piece is about

one of the worst things that ever happened in Wales.

Yeah, Aberfan, '66.

I was in primary school, eight years old. Remember it happening, vividly.

And these objects as well, of course, these are from 1966.

They're very old primary-school chairs, which I managed to source,

30 of them, you know, to represent the class.

And what I did, I cast coal and bitumen wedges

to sit on 30 primary-school chairs.

And the idea came from a photograph I saw,

where the spillage just came in through a school window in Aberfan

and just settled on a desk and chair.

And I saw that image and that gave me the idea.

Because of the nature of the bitumen -

over time, it moves,

which was fantastic, really,

for the narrative of Aberfan, really.

It's something that people who might not be part of that art elite,

that audience...

they don't have to have a special language to understand it, do they?

No, they don't. Erm...

That's something I'm always conscious of as well, you know.

Again, it might come from my background.

I like the person next door to me

to be able to read something into the work.

You're not going to be able to read all the subtleties and the detail,

but I would like somebody in my street

to be able to look at the work and think, yeah, that's about Aberfan,

or that's about...whatever, you know.

I like ordinary people to be...

To be part of the audience, really.

David Garner, like David Carpanini, is deeply concerned

with the devastating after-effects of industry.

But there are other artistic views of the Valleys

which are equally powerful.

Kevin Sinnott lives and works in the Garw Valley.

One of the most popular contemporary Welsh artists,

his figure paintings are full of dynamism and colour,

with people out in the streets and up on the hills.

To me, he captures the vitality of the Valleys better than anyone.

Paintings which celebrate the humour and panache

of the people who live and love in these towns and villages.

Another artist with a distinct vision is John Selway,

who's painted in Abertillery for over 60 years.

Selway studied alongside David Hockney

at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s,

and his work has developed into a rich, magic-realist style.

Selway draws on music and poetry,

and his sinewy forms seem to envelop you.

Even when they're not directly about the landscape where he lives,

they could only have been painted in these steep-sided valleys

where the sky is far above.

In this programme, I've looked at how the history of the Valleys

and the art that's been made there

are closely connected.

But perhaps the powerful presence of the past,

especially the industrial past,

has now become too dominant.

Over the past decade or so,

there's been a tendency to memorialise

the suffering of the Valleys.

Monumental sculptures erected on the site of pit disasters

and closed collieries.

In a way, it's understandable.

The mines were closed and demolished so quickly

that the older generation wants to pass on what's been lost.

But sometimes history hangs over the Valleys like a shroud.

But people love living in the Valleys,

and they're beginning to regain the natural splendour

that attracted artists like Turner

in the 18th century.

I'm sure, and I hope, that this beautiful landscape

will now inspire a new generation of artists

to create their own contemporary visions of the Valleys.