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Welsh art of the 20th century is the story of how artists grappled with their tumultuous times, | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
producing work that sometimes reflected and sometimes challenged the Wales they'd emerged from. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:15 | |
Once upon a time, I wanted to be one of those artists. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:19 | |
And after school here in Aberdare, I went to Hornsey College of Art | 0:00:19 | 0:00:23 | |
in London and straight into the art college revolt of 1968. | 0:00:23 | 0:00:28 | |
All in agreement? I propose that we now march down to Wood Green Civic Centre... | 0:00:31 | 0:00:35 | |
Later, as Minister for the Arts, I hit the headlines | 0:00:35 | 0:00:38 | |
when I criticised what I saw as the emptiness of some modern art. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:44 | |
Now I've retired from politics and taken up painting again. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:49 | |
In this series, I'm going to look at the story of art in Wales during the 20th century, meet some | 0:00:49 | 0:00:55 | |
amazing artists, and discover some unforgettable works of art. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:59 | |
In the years after the Second World War, there was a momentum to Welsh art. | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
But there was no single style or school of painting. | 0:01:13 | 0:01:17 | |
Instead, a number of talented individualists | 0:01:17 | 0:01:21 | |
created their own pictures of Wales and in the process, made some lasting images of Welsh life. | 0:01:21 | 0:01:28 | |
The Second World War caused a massive movement of people | 0:01:43 | 0:01:46 | |
around Europe, and Welsh art benefited from an influx of refugees. | 0:01:46 | 0:01:51 | |
Two artists who had escaped from fascism and made their home in Wales where Heinz Koppel and Josef Herman. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:59 | |
Both Jewish, they had fled the Nazis and made their way eventually to the valleys of South Wales. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:06 | |
The place had a profound impact upon their work, | 0:02:06 | 0:02:10 | |
and in turn, their work had a dramatic effect upon Welsh art. | 0:02:10 | 0:02:15 | |
WHISTLE BLOWS | 0:02:20 | 0:02:22 | |
Josef Herman was a Polish artist whose flight from the Nazis | 0:02:29 | 0:02:32 | |
took him first to Glasgow, and finally to Ystradgynlais, where he settled in 1944. | 0:02:32 | 0:02:39 | |
The town was at the height of the anthracite coalfield, | 0:02:39 | 0:02:42 | |
and Herman was inspired by the sight of miners working. | 0:02:42 | 0:02:47 | |
He returned to the subject again and again during a long career which | 0:02:47 | 0:02:51 | |
ended with his death in the year 2000. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
For Herman, the miner became a symbolic form, and his paintings of them became famous. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:07 | |
These large panels, now in the Glynn Vivian in Swansea, were commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951. | 0:03:07 | 0:03:16 | |
Josef Herman was celebrated in his own lifetime. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:36 | |
But another emigre artist was less well-known, but equally influential. | 0:03:36 | 0:03:42 | |
The German, Heinz Koppel, settled here in Dowlais, near Merthyr, in 1944. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:48 | |
Part of an artistic community, he taught local people and young artists. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:53 | |
His widow, Pip, remembers those tough early years. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:58 | |
He was eccentric, you'd call it now. | 0:03:58 | 0:04:02 | |
We didn't use words like that then. | 0:04:02 | 0:04:07 | |
But he was a very approachable person. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:12 | |
Not a jolly person, he was serious. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
If somebody wanted to work, he took them seriously. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:21 | |
And he was interested to see | 0:04:21 | 0:04:23 | |
what people who came to paint chose to paint, to do. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:29 | |
He painted them, and they painted | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
what they found and saw. | 0:04:33 | 0:04:35 | |
Lots of young artists came to see him, because of course Heinz was an established painter. | 0:04:39 | 0:04:47 | |
Were they in awe of Heinz? | 0:04:47 | 0:04:49 | |
How did he greet them? | 0:04:49 | 0:04:51 | |
They never expressed awe, there was a very | 0:04:51 | 0:04:56 | |
good relationship, but very clearly an appreciation of each other. | 0:04:56 | 0:05:04 | |
Rather than | 0:05:04 | 0:05:06 | |
him up there and they down there. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:09 | |
Heinz Koppel's effect on young artists in Wales | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
wouldn't be seen for another decade, but at the time, the Welsh arts establishment found him difficult. | 0:05:14 | 0:05:21 | |
Was he too much of a modernist for them? | 0:05:21 | 0:05:24 | |
No, I think the European element confused them, | 0:05:24 | 0:05:29 | |
which came out and was too strange, too strong, at that time. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:37 | |
If Heinz Koppel was too European for some in Wales, Ceri Richards, | 0:05:49 | 0:05:53 | |
the best-known Welsh artist of the mid-20th century, | 0:05:53 | 0:05:57 | |
had no such problems. | 0:05:57 | 0:05:58 | |
In the 1930s, Ceri Richards embraced the new European art. | 0:06:06 | 0:06:11 | |
And after the Second World War, he became one of the most successful British artists. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:16 | |
Inspired by Matisse and Picasso, he produced dreamlike, Surrealist paintings. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:23 | |
Richards's paintings of this period are complex, multi-layered works. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:31 | |
The Cycle of Nature, from 1944, reflected his idea that even in war, | 0:06:31 | 0:06:36 | |
nature will take over and a rebirth will begin again. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:40 | |
Ceri Richards's daughter, Rhiannon, explained to me how her father worked. | 0:06:44 | 0:06:49 | |
This is one of your father's sketchbooks. | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
When would this be from, roughly? | 0:06:51 | 0:06:53 | |
Well, he's actually taken the trouble to date it. New Year's Day, 1949. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:58 | |
It's very interesting, although it's quite a rough black and white sketch. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:03 | |
We can see the individual colours here. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
-Yes. -And they are directions for a painting. -That's right, they're directions. | 0:07:06 | 0:07:10 | |
Every little piece has got its own colour. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
This says dark pink, I think. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:17 | |
This was a very detailed plan for a future painting. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:22 | |
And there are lots of drawings in here. | 0:07:24 | 0:07:26 | |
In this one, a third of the picture is a piano. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:29 | |
-Yes. -What was it about pianos and pianists and music and so on? | 0:07:29 | 0:07:34 | |
Well, he was trained | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
to play the piano from an early age, as were all the family. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
And he remained a very, very good pianist and as soon as he could afford it, he bought a piano | 0:07:40 | 0:07:47 | |
and had pianos all his life, and played every day. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
And played very, very well. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:53 | |
This features in different ways in such a lot of his work. | 0:07:53 | 0:07:57 | |
This picture, I love particularly, because of those fingers! | 0:08:12 | 0:08:16 | |
-They're great fingers, aren't they? -Yes, yes. | 0:08:16 | 0:08:18 | |
-But they're so different from the drawings he did of you, for example. -Yes, absolutely. | 0:08:18 | 0:08:23 | |
He employed a different method, or a different approach, if you like, when he was doing pictures of the family. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:30 | |
He did beautiful ones of me when I was a baby and a young child, and of | 0:08:30 | 0:08:35 | |
his sister, and of my sister, and of his wife as well. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:39 | |
Someone else who remembers Ceri Richards is the artist Joan Baker. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:57 | |
Now 88, she was one of his students at Cardiff School of Art during the Second World War. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:03 | |
For wartime students like Joan, seeing the latest modern art was almost impossible. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:09 | |
But Ceri Richards owned a surrealist masterpiece by the German artist, Max Ernst. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:16 | |
So, Ceri Richards brought into the Cardiff School of Art a real painting by Max Ernst, original? | 0:09:16 | 0:09:23 | |
-Yes, a real Max Ernst. -And he brought it in for you to see? | 0:09:23 | 0:09:26 | |
Oh, he brought it in for the students to see. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:30 | |
You know, just to look down and see this, and there it was. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:35 | |
It was fascinating. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:36 | |
And the wonderful feeling of seeing the living thing, because wartime | 0:09:36 | 0:09:42 | |
was very restricted as to what you could see. We were lucky. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:46 | |
It was just so thrilling and exciting. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:50 | |
I don't know why people ever bother | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
with drink or take drugs or anything, the sheer excitement of art... | 0:09:53 | 0:09:59 | |
is so wonderful in itself. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
Joan Baker later became a lecturer at Cardiff School of Art, | 0:10:04 | 0:10:08 | |
and has spent the last 60 years painting the South Wales landscape. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
Just as Joan Baker had been taught by Ceri Richards, now it was her turn to pass on ideas about art. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:26 | |
And after the war, a new generation of Cardiff art students were heading down the tracks. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:32 | |
The late 1940s were a time of optimism in South Wales. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:46 | |
The mines had just been nationalised, Nye Bevan's health service was up and running, | 0:10:46 | 0:10:51 | |
and increasing numbers of people were going to further education, including to art college. | 0:10:51 | 0:10:58 | |
Among them where a group of young men who travelled by train every day | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
from the Rhondda Valley to the Cardiff School of Art. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:06 | |
Their carriage became a legendary mobile art class. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:12 | |
These young art students called themselves the Rhondda Group, and | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
included artists like Ernie Zobole, Robert Thomas and Charlie Burton. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:25 | |
Charlie Burton is one of the last survivors of the group. | 0:11:25 | 0:11:27 | |
Now in his early 80s, he's still painting. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:32 | |
We were a little group and we spoke continually | 0:11:32 | 0:11:37 | |
about the arts. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
It was quite a long journey from Treherbert to Cardiff, by train. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
It seemed very short, it seemed very short. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
Because the discussion was so intense. | 0:11:45 | 0:11:47 | |
You know the way time plays tricks. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
Nobody was allowed to get into our compartment. | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
We spoke about painting all the way down in the train, and looked at one another's drawings. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:05 | |
-You were obsessed by the subject? -Yes, yes, we were. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
There were big arguments of who was the better painter, Matisse or Picasso. Bonnard was still alive. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:20 | |
We were just living the business. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:23 | |
The Rhondda Group I think, with hindsight now, we realise more and more how exceptional they were. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:35 | |
And they emerged in the immediate post-war period. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:38 | |
And here we have a kind of major transition point. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:41 | |
During the Second World War, you actually had Ceri Richards | 0:12:41 | 0:12:44 | |
teaching in Cardiff College of Art, alongside Evan Charlton. | 0:12:44 | 0:12:48 | |
And the exceptional art being produced then was by the teachers. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:53 | |
But come 1945 and thereafter, it switches now to a new generation, | 0:12:53 | 0:12:58 | |
and these are not the teachers, these are the students. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:01 | |
They were Rhondda rooted, and yet their vision was European. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:05 | |
We were terribly interested in everything that was happening in the world. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:17 | |
We knew that we weren't Cezanne or Van Gogh, living in the south of France. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:22 | |
You know, we lived | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
in the Rhondda, and there was a feeling after the war | 0:13:25 | 0:13:30 | |
that one could really do something oneself, exactly where one was. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:36 | |
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS | 0:13:45 | 0:13:47 | |
Perhaps the best known artist of the Rhondda Group was Ernest Zobole. | 0:13:52 | 0:13:58 | |
The son of Italian immigrants, he was inspired by Heinz Koppel | 0:13:58 | 0:14:03 | |
to create dreamlike paintings of his home town, a kind of Welsh magic realism. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:10 | |
The University of Glamorgan in Pontypridd has a fine collection of Ernest Zobole's work. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:17 | |
Art historian, Ceri Thomas, whose father Robert was also a key | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
member of the Rhondda Group, is an expert on Zobole. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:26 | |
Ernie Zobole, | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
very early on, even when he was still an art student, was painting | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
in colours which looked like very, very avant-garde European painters. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:39 | |
Where would he have seen this kind of work? | 0:14:39 | 0:14:42 | |
Very early on, they were travelling to London and looking at the latest exhibitions. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:46 | |
So Van Gogh, you know, the explosion of colour that was Van Gogh, was known to Zobole. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:51 | |
But closer to home, I think it really was Ceri Richards. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
In these pictures, in the early Fifties, he's limiting his palette to a blue. | 0:14:54 | 0:15:00 | |
And Richards had experimented with that same kind of palette, himself looking back at people like Matisse, | 0:15:00 | 0:15:06 | |
in a series of paintings of Trafalgar Square. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:08 | |
So we have Zobole then looking at the squares and the streets | 0:15:08 | 0:15:12 | |
in the Rhondda, | 0:15:12 | 0:15:13 | |
and introducing this blue, as you say, avant-garde palette. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
As his career progressed, Ernest Zobole's paintings became more stylised, | 0:15:22 | 0:15:27 | |
transforming the Rhondda into an abstract and simplified universe. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:31 | |
In the final years before his death in 1999, Ernest Zobole | 0:15:39 | 0:15:43 | |
created a unique image of his native valley, often seen at night, and full of jewel-like colours. | 0:15:43 | 0:15:51 | |
When I have spoken about getting different angles, different shots, different viewpoints | 0:15:53 | 0:15:59 | |
into the same picture, getting in more than one could see, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
as it were, from one viewpoint. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
This night-time thing helps in doing that, because looking round | 0:16:07 | 0:16:11 | |
now, you can see objects illuminated, and they crop up at different levels of a black curtain, as it were. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:22 | |
Ceri, this is the mid-1990s, and this is one of Ernie Zobole's last paintings. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:29 | |
It's about a man who knows he hasn't got much longer to live. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:33 | |
It's a very beautiful painting. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
The right hand side of the painting is more abstract. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:38 | |
But certainly, the left-hand side, you know, the figure returns and he | 0:16:38 | 0:16:41 | |
actually is painting himself here, in this curious rectangle. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:45 | |
Some people see the rectangle not as a mirror, not as a doorway, but as a coffin. | 0:16:45 | 0:16:49 | |
So, I think there is that kind of resonance. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:54 | |
Certainly in his mind's eye, he is moving away into another place. | 0:16:54 | 0:16:59 | |
And the whole kind of Rhondda is almost becoming an encapsulated bubble. | 0:16:59 | 0:17:02 | |
And we have this 360 degrees of sky round the edge. | 0:17:02 | 0:17:08 | |
This is almost Planet Rhondda. | 0:17:08 | 0:17:10 | |
In the 1950s, radical ideas in modern art had their advocates in Wales. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:20 | |
The 56 Group, founded in 1956, were excited by the latest abstract art, | 0:17:20 | 0:17:26 | |
and their exhibitions often stirred up controversy. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:30 | |
Their most famous member was Arthur Giardelli, who created fantastic | 0:17:30 | 0:17:34 | |
collages, inspired by the sea shore near his Pembrokeshire home. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:39 | |
But if his subject matter was Welsh, | 0:17:43 | 0:17:45 | |
he took inspiration from the new European art. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:50 | |
It was not dissatisfaction with representational art, showing | 0:17:50 | 0:17:54 | |
trees and cows in my pictures, that led me eventually to picking bits of wood out of a heap of old wreckage. | 0:17:54 | 0:18:00 | |
I went to Holland, lecturing on British painting, and had the chance to see a lot of work of painters | 0:18:00 | 0:18:06 | |
like Mondrian, a great innovator in abstract painting, using such simple forms as squares and rectangles. | 0:18:06 | 0:18:13 | |
But others retained a more traditional perspective. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:19 | |
Will Roberts, who'd studied with Josef Herman, painted the | 0:18:19 | 0:18:24 | |
dignity of people working on the land around his home in Neath. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
There's no single style to Welsh art in the 1940s and 1950s. | 0:18:36 | 0:18:41 | |
Right across Wales, artists were painting their own people and places, in their own way. | 0:18:41 | 0:18:46 | |
John Elwyn was born in Cardiganshire. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
For much of his life, he taught in England. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:52 | |
But he still managed to create an evocative sense of the Wales that he grew up in. | 0:18:52 | 0:18:59 | |
Someone who knew John Elwyn is the head of Aberystwyth's School of Art, Robert Meyrick. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:18 | |
He showed me his private collection of Elwyn's paintings. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:22 | |
John Elwyn produced landscapes that seemed to me to be | 0:19:24 | 0:19:30 | |
as lovely and as accurate an image of Wales as is possible to imagine. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:36 | |
But he painted these living away from Wales? | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
Yes. All his paintings are based upon his recollections of Wales, sketchbook drawings. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:46 | |
I would often visit him at weekends down in Winchester, | 0:19:46 | 0:19:49 | |
leave here on the most miserable wet November evenings, | 0:19:49 | 0:19:53 | |
arrive about 9 o'clock, | 0:19:53 | 0:19:54 | |
and be surrounded by these paintings in his studio. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:58 | |
And I'd say, that's not the Wales that I know, you should have seen it when I left. | 0:19:58 | 0:20:01 | |
He said, oh, there's enough misery and greyness in this world without me adding to it! | 0:20:01 | 0:20:08 | |
This is a fascinating painting - the top half contains, | 0:20:08 | 0:20:13 | |
if you like, all of the iconography that we're interested in in Wales. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:18 | |
You've got a school, a chapel, you've got these little houses clustered together. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:24 | |
The whole of the bottom half is this extraordinary field. Did he ever talk about this painting to you? | 0:20:24 | 0:20:28 | |
Yes. He would often paint and see what suggested itself. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:33 | |
And it was about this lovely sort of contrast between all these subtle | 0:20:33 | 0:20:37 | |
greys and pinks and pale yellows, and this very vibrant orange and yellow. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:43 | |
Now here, we've got two church deacons, or something. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:46 | |
I find this a more idealised picture of an imagined Wales | 0:20:46 | 0:20:52 | |
than the paintings of the farms and the hillsides. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:55 | |
Well, it is, because actually, he's painting Wales here of the 1920s when he was a child. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:59 | |
And I think it's done with great sincerity. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
But it's the attention to detail, you know, whether you had a red strip | 0:21:02 | 0:21:06 | |
on the top of the binding of your Bible, or whether you had a gold one. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:10 | |
I think John Elwyn's paintings are instantly identifiable for the way in which he applies paint. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:22 | |
He's a very painterly painter, despite their representation. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:28 | |
You know, they're not entirely about the process of mark-making. | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
But also adventurous in his use of colour. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:34 | |
Artists often explore with great intensity their creative relationship with their environment. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:53 | |
The last two artists in this programme both did that. | 0:21:53 | 0:21:56 | |
Kyffin Williams in the mountains of Snowdonia, and Brenda Chamberlain on the island of Bardsey. | 0:21:56 | 0:22:02 | |
Brenda Chamberlain was a poet as well as a painter and printmaker. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
A rare woman artist of this period, in the late 1940s, | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
she moved to Bardsey Island on the tip of the Llyn Peninsula. | 0:22:12 | 0:22:16 | |
It's not easy to reach now, but in those days, it was about as remote as you could get in Wales. | 0:22:16 | 0:22:23 | |
Full of years and seasoned like a salt timber, | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
the island fisherman has come to terms with death. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:35 | |
His crabbed fingers are afire with phosphorus. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
From the night sea he fishes for bright armoured herring. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:44 | |
The National Library in Aberystwyth holds a large collection of Brenda Chamberlain's work. | 0:22:44 | 0:22:50 | |
I went there to meet Chamberlain expert, Jill Piercy. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
Jill, what year did Brenda move to Bardsey? | 0:22:53 | 0:22:58 | |
Well, after a day trip in, I think it was 45, she moved in 1946. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:05 | |
And stayed there until 1962. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:08 | |
She lived very frugally, | 0:23:08 | 0:23:10 | |
but quite often she was very low on food. | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
If she ran out of canvases, she'd paint on newspaper. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
And there's one painting I saw which was the hardboard on the side of the sink, that she painted on. | 0:23:17 | 0:23:23 | |
Nothing else to paint on, she had to paint. | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
These are some of the drawings that she did in Bardsey? | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
Yes. Yes. And in fact, these were used in her book, Tide Race. | 0:23:31 | 0:23:37 | |
And she's drawing shells and fish, the people, presumably, who were on the island? | 0:23:37 | 0:23:43 | |
Yes, that'll be one of the children on the island. | 0:23:43 | 0:23:46 | |
The shape of the faces that she tended to draw were all very | 0:23:46 | 0:23:50 | |
similar, very elongated, with these almond eyes. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:54 | |
There were very few artists, male or female, who were able to survive just by their work. | 0:23:54 | 0:24:01 | |
And particularly, there were very few female contemporaries at that time, and very few galleries. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:09 | |
So you really had to fight to get your work out there. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:12 | |
Brenda Chamberlain was always a restless figure, who lived on | 0:24:16 | 0:24:20 | |
a Greek island before coming back to North Wales, where she died in 1971. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:25 | |
But for some artists, they discover their ideal landscape, and spend their lives exploring it. | 0:24:25 | 0:24:32 | |
One of those was Kyffin Williams, and the place that inspired him was the uplands of North Wales. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:40 | |
Permanence of the mountains, the weight of the mountains, | 0:24:45 | 0:24:49 | |
the light of the mountains and the shapes of the mountains. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
As this light, | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
light the other side of the ridges, the darkness of the hill against the bright sky and the bustling clouds. | 0:24:54 | 0:25:01 | |
And the lines of the walls and the lines of the ridges. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
This is always excitement. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:07 | |
I suppose one of the reasons why I paint is for excitement. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:13 | |
Kyffin Williams was born on Anglesey in 1918. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:17 | |
A doctor suggested he took up painting as a therapy for his epilepsy. | 0:25:17 | 0:25:22 | |
He spent the next 60 years painting this landscape and the people who live and work in it. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:30 | |
He became the most famous Welsh artist of his generation. | 0:25:30 | 0:25:35 | |
At the gallery on Anglesey, dedicated to the artist's work, | 0:25:37 | 0:25:41 | |
John Smith, who knew Kyffin, described his working methods. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:45 | |
This was one of his favourite locations. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:48 | |
This is where he chose to do this pencil drawing, | 0:25:48 | 0:25:52 | |
with some watercolour in it, as a preparation for a larger painting. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:56 | |
It is. You can see it's been done very quickly, in a very bold manner. | 0:25:56 | 0:26:00 | |
It probably took a few minutes, and then he would take it back to | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
the studio, or even to the car, and block some of the colours in, these subtle colours. | 0:26:03 | 0:26:09 | |
The dark tones. Just to give it body and form. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:12 | |
It's a rock-solid technique, though, isn't it? | 0:26:12 | 0:26:14 | |
You can see straight away, this is the imprint of a great draughtsman. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:18 | |
Well, his background was in draughtsmanship, you know, | 0:26:18 | 0:26:21 | |
the companies he worked for, land agents and estate agents. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
And he knew the structure of buildings. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:27 | |
And this was a preparation, of course, for this painting? | 0:26:27 | 0:26:31 | |
That's correct. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:33 | |
John, this couldn't be anything other than a Kyffin Williams, could it? | 0:26:37 | 0:26:41 | |
It's a signature painting, isn't it? | 0:26:41 | 0:26:43 | |
Well, it's a bold statement. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
It's iconic, isn't it? | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
The way the paint has been put on, this black lining which he's | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
picked up from the drawing which we've just seen there. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
This is a very special technique, of course. You've got | 0:26:53 | 0:26:57 | |
a palette knife being used, very thick colour, being put on very, very quickly. | 0:26:57 | 0:27:03 | |
But incredibly skilfully. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:05 | |
Thick paint is delightful to use. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:13 | |
And I like that paint, and I like drawing with the brush into thick, palette knife paint. | 0:27:13 | 0:27:21 | |
It pleases me. It may not please other people, but it pleases me, and that's the important thing. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:26 | |
I enjoy it. | 0:27:26 | 0:27:28 | |
And the strong contrast produced by a knife, using some ivory black and | 0:27:28 | 0:27:34 | |
yellow ochre against some bright, light, flake white sky or something, to me, it is satisfying. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:42 | |
He liked to get the paint out and mix it very, very quickly. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:46 | |
Not completely, sometimes. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
And take it up on the palette knife and put it on, almost like butter, what they call impasto. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:53 | |
He became very, very keen on this technique. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
The main reason was, it gave this lovely, sculptural effect. | 0:27:56 | 0:27:59 | |
We see all these impasto areas here. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:02 | |
And it gave a dynamic to it, it was almost like a sculpture. | 0:28:02 | 0:28:05 | |
The main emphasis was to develop a style of his own. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:11 | |
The old adage that once you've seen one Kyffin, you've seen them all, is absolute rubbish. | 0:28:11 | 0:28:16 | |
Painters like Kyffin Williams and many others established | 0:28:33 | 0:28:36 | |
a popular tradition of Welsh art concerned mainly with landscape. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
In our final programme, we'll be looking at the end of the 20th century, when some artists | 0:28:40 | 0:28:46 | |
broke with painting and sculpture to challenge the very notion of art itself. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:51 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:29:06 | 0:29:08 |