Episode 3 Framing Wales


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Welsh art of the 20th century is the story of how artists grappled with their tumultuous times,

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producing work that sometimes reflected and sometimes challenged the Wales they'd emerged from.

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Once upon a time, I wanted to be one of those artists.

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And after school here in Aberdare, I went to Hornsey College of Art

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in London and straight into the art college revolt of 1968.

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All in agreement? I propose that we now march down to Wood Green Civic Centre...

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Later, as Minister for the Arts, I hit the headlines

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when I criticised what I saw as the emptiness of some modern art.

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Now I've retired from politics and taken up painting again.

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In this series, I'm going to look at the story of art in Wales during the 20th century, meet some

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amazing artists, and discover some unforgettable works of art.

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In the years after the Second World War, there was a momentum to Welsh art.

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But there was no single style or school of painting.

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Instead, a number of talented individualists

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created their own pictures of Wales and in the process, made some lasting images of Welsh life.

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The Second World War caused a massive movement of people

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around Europe, and Welsh art benefited from an influx of refugees.

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Two artists who had escaped from fascism and made their home in Wales where Heinz Koppel and Josef Herman.

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Both Jewish, they had fled the Nazis and made their way eventually to the valleys of South Wales.

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The place had a profound impact upon their work,

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and in turn, their work had a dramatic effect upon Welsh art.

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WHISTLE BLOWS

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Josef Herman was a Polish artist whose flight from the Nazis

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took him first to Glasgow, and finally to Ystradgynlais, where he settled in 1944.

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The town was at the height of the anthracite coalfield,

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and Herman was inspired by the sight of miners working.

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He returned to the subject again and again during a long career which

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ended with his death in the year 2000.

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For Herman, the miner became a symbolic form, and his paintings of them became famous.

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These large panels, now in the Glynn Vivian in Swansea, were commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

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Josef Herman was celebrated in his own lifetime.

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But another emigre artist was less well-known, but equally influential.

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The German, Heinz Koppel, settled here in Dowlais, near Merthyr, in 1944.

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Part of an artistic community, he taught local people and young artists.

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His widow, Pip, remembers those tough early years.

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He was eccentric, you'd call it now.

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We didn't use words like that then.

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But he was a very approachable person.

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Not a jolly person, he was serious.

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If somebody wanted to work, he took them seriously.

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And he was interested to see

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what people who came to paint chose to paint, to do.

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He painted them, and they painted

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what they found and saw.

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Lots of young artists came to see him, because of course Heinz was an established painter.

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Were they in awe of Heinz?

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How did he greet them?

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They never expressed awe, there was a very

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good relationship, but very clearly an appreciation of each other.

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Rather than

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him up there and they down there.

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Heinz Koppel's effect on young artists in Wales

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wouldn't be seen for another decade, but at the time, the Welsh arts establishment found him difficult.

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Was he too much of a modernist for them?

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No, I think the European element confused them,

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which came out and was too strange, too strong, at that time.

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If Heinz Koppel was too European for some in Wales, Ceri Richards,

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the best-known Welsh artist of the mid-20th century,

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had no such problems.

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In the 1930s, Ceri Richards embraced the new European art.

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And after the Second World War, he became one of the most successful British artists.

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Inspired by Matisse and Picasso, he produced dreamlike, Surrealist paintings.

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Richards's paintings of this period are complex, multi-layered works.

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The Cycle of Nature, from 1944, reflected his idea that even in war,

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nature will take over and a rebirth will begin again.

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Ceri Richards's daughter, Rhiannon, explained to me how her father worked.

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This is one of your father's sketchbooks.

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When would this be from, roughly?

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Well, he's actually taken the trouble to date it. New Year's Day, 1949.

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It's very interesting, although it's quite a rough black and white sketch.

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We can see the individual colours here.

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-Yes.

-And they are directions for a painting.

-That's right, they're directions.

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Every little piece has got its own colour.

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This says dark pink, I think.

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This was a very detailed plan for a future painting.

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And there are lots of drawings in here.

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In this one, a third of the picture is a piano.

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-Yes.

-What was it about pianos and pianists and music and so on?

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Well, he was trained

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to play the piano from an early age, as were all the family.

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And he remained a very, very good pianist and as soon as he could afford it, he bought a piano

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and had pianos all his life, and played every day.

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And played very, very well.

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This features in different ways in such a lot of his work.

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This picture, I love particularly, because of those fingers!

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-They're great fingers, aren't they?

-Yes, yes.

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-But they're so different from the drawings he did of you, for example.

-Yes, absolutely.

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He employed a different method, or a different approach, if you like, when he was doing pictures of the family.

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He did beautiful ones of me when I was a baby and a young child, and of

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his sister, and of my sister, and of his wife as well.

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Someone else who remembers Ceri Richards is the artist Joan Baker.

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Now 88, she was one of his students at Cardiff School of Art during the Second World War.

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For wartime students like Joan, seeing the latest modern art was almost impossible.

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But Ceri Richards owned a surrealist masterpiece by the German artist, Max Ernst.

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So, Ceri Richards brought into the Cardiff School of Art a real painting by Max Ernst, original?

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-Yes, a real Max Ernst.

-And he brought it in for you to see?

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Oh, he brought it in for the students to see.

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You know, just to look down and see this, and there it was.

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It was fascinating.

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And the wonderful feeling of seeing the living thing, because wartime

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was very restricted as to what you could see. We were lucky.

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It was just so thrilling and exciting.

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I don't know why people ever bother

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with drink or take drugs or anything, the sheer excitement of art...

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is so wonderful in itself.

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Joan Baker later became a lecturer at Cardiff School of Art,

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and has spent the last 60 years painting the South Wales landscape.

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Just as Joan Baker had been taught by Ceri Richards, now it was her turn to pass on ideas about art.

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And after the war, a new generation of Cardiff art students were heading down the tracks.

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The late 1940s were a time of optimism in South Wales.

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The mines had just been nationalised, Nye Bevan's health service was up and running,

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and increasing numbers of people were going to further education, including to art college.

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Among them where a group of young men who travelled by train every day

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from the Rhondda Valley to the Cardiff School of Art.

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Their carriage became a legendary mobile art class.

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These young art students called themselves the Rhondda Group, and

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included artists like Ernie Zobole, Robert Thomas and Charlie Burton.

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Charlie Burton is one of the last survivors of the group.

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Now in his early 80s, he's still painting.

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We were a little group and we spoke continually

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about the arts.

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It was quite a long journey from Treherbert to Cardiff, by train.

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It seemed very short, it seemed very short.

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Because the discussion was so intense.

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You know the way time plays tricks.

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Nobody was allowed to get into our compartment.

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We spoke about painting all the way down in the train, and looked at one another's drawings.

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-You were obsessed by the subject?

-Yes, yes, we were.

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There were big arguments of who was the better painter, Matisse or Picasso. Bonnard was still alive.

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We were just living the business.

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The Rhondda Group I think, with hindsight now, we realise more and more how exceptional they were.

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And they emerged in the immediate post-war period.

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And here we have a kind of major transition point.

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During the Second World War, you actually had Ceri Richards

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teaching in Cardiff College of Art, alongside Evan Charlton.

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And the exceptional art being produced then was by the teachers.

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But come 1945 and thereafter, it switches now to a new generation,

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and these are not the teachers, these are the students.

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They were Rhondda rooted, and yet their vision was European.

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We were terribly interested in everything that was happening in the world.

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We knew that we weren't Cezanne or Van Gogh, living in the south of France.

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You know, we lived

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in the Rhondda, and there was a feeling after the war

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that one could really do something oneself, exactly where one was.

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TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS

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Perhaps the best known artist of the Rhondda Group was Ernest Zobole.

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The son of Italian immigrants, he was inspired by Heinz Koppel

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to create dreamlike paintings of his home town, a kind of Welsh magic realism.

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The University of Glamorgan in Pontypridd has a fine collection of Ernest Zobole's work.

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Art historian, Ceri Thomas, whose father Robert was also a key

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member of the Rhondda Group, is an expert on Zobole.

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Ernie Zobole,

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very early on, even when he was still an art student, was painting

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in colours which looked like very, very avant-garde European painters.

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Where would he have seen this kind of work?

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Very early on, they were travelling to London and looking at the latest exhibitions.

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So Van Gogh, you know, the explosion of colour that was Van Gogh, was known to Zobole.

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But closer to home, I think it really was Ceri Richards.

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In these pictures, in the early Fifties, he's limiting his palette to a blue.

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And Richards had experimented with that same kind of palette, himself looking back at people like Matisse,

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in a series of paintings of Trafalgar Square.

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So we have Zobole then looking at the squares and the streets

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in the Rhondda,

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and introducing this blue, as you say, avant-garde palette.

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As his career progressed, Ernest Zobole's paintings became more stylised,

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transforming the Rhondda into an abstract and simplified universe.

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In the final years before his death in 1999, Ernest Zobole

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created a unique image of his native valley, often seen at night, and full of jewel-like colours.

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When I have spoken about getting different angles, different shots, different viewpoints

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into the same picture, getting in more than one could see,

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as it were, from one viewpoint.

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This night-time thing helps in doing that, because looking round

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now, you can see objects illuminated, and they crop up at different levels of a black curtain, as it were.

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Ceri, this is the mid-1990s, and this is one of Ernie Zobole's last paintings.

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It's about a man who knows he hasn't got much longer to live.

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It's a very beautiful painting.

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The right hand side of the painting is more abstract.

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But certainly, the left-hand side, you know, the figure returns and he

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actually is painting himself here, in this curious rectangle.

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Some people see the rectangle not as a mirror, not as a doorway, but as a coffin.

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So, I think there is that kind of resonance.

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Certainly in his mind's eye, he is moving away into another place.

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And the whole kind of Rhondda is almost becoming an encapsulated bubble.

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And we have this 360 degrees of sky round the edge.

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This is almost Planet Rhondda.

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In the 1950s, radical ideas in modern art had their advocates in Wales.

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The 56 Group, founded in 1956, were excited by the latest abstract art,

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and their exhibitions often stirred up controversy.

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Their most famous member was Arthur Giardelli, who created fantastic

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collages, inspired by the sea shore near his Pembrokeshire home.

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But if his subject matter was Welsh,

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he took inspiration from the new European art.

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It was not dissatisfaction with representational art, showing

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trees and cows in my pictures, that led me eventually to picking bits of wood out of a heap of old wreckage.

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I went to Holland, lecturing on British painting, and had the chance to see a lot of work of painters

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like Mondrian, a great innovator in abstract painting, using such simple forms as squares and rectangles.

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But others retained a more traditional perspective.

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Will Roberts, who'd studied with Josef Herman, painted the

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dignity of people working on the land around his home in Neath.

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There's no single style to Welsh art in the 1940s and 1950s.

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Right across Wales, artists were painting their own people and places, in their own way.

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John Elwyn was born in Cardiganshire.

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For much of his life, he taught in England.

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But he still managed to create an evocative sense of the Wales that he grew up in.

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Someone who knew John Elwyn is the head of Aberystwyth's School of Art, Robert Meyrick.

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He showed me his private collection of Elwyn's paintings.

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John Elwyn produced landscapes that seemed to me to be

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as lovely and as accurate an image of Wales as is possible to imagine.

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But he painted these living away from Wales?

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Yes. All his paintings are based upon his recollections of Wales, sketchbook drawings.

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I would often visit him at weekends down in Winchester,

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leave here on the most miserable wet November evenings,

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arrive about 9 o'clock,

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and be surrounded by these paintings in his studio.

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And I'd say, that's not the Wales that I know, you should have seen it when I left.

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He said, oh, there's enough misery and greyness in this world without me adding to it!

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This is a fascinating painting - the top half contains,

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if you like, all of the iconography that we're interested in in Wales.

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You've got a school, a chapel, you've got these little houses clustered together.

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The whole of the bottom half is this extraordinary field. Did he ever talk about this painting to you?

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Yes. He would often paint and see what suggested itself.

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And it was about this lovely sort of contrast between all these subtle

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greys and pinks and pale yellows, and this very vibrant orange and yellow.

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Now here, we've got two church deacons, or something.

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I find this a more idealised picture of an imagined Wales

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than the paintings of the farms and the hillsides.

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Well, it is, because actually, he's painting Wales here of the 1920s when he was a child.

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And I think it's done with great sincerity.

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But it's the attention to detail, you know, whether you had a red strip

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on the top of the binding of your Bible, or whether you had a gold one.

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I think John Elwyn's paintings are instantly identifiable for the way in which he applies paint.

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He's a very painterly painter, despite their representation.

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You know, they're not entirely about the process of mark-making.

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But also adventurous in his use of colour.

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Artists often explore with great intensity their creative relationship with their environment.

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The last two artists in this programme both did that.

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Kyffin Williams in the mountains of Snowdonia, and Brenda Chamberlain on the island of Bardsey.

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Brenda Chamberlain was a poet as well as a painter and printmaker.

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A rare woman artist of this period, in the late 1940s,

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she moved to Bardsey Island on the tip of the Llyn Peninsula.

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It's not easy to reach now, but in those days, it was about as remote as you could get in Wales.

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Full of years and seasoned like a salt timber,

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the island fisherman has come to terms with death.

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His crabbed fingers are afire with phosphorus.

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From the night sea he fishes for bright armoured herring.

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The National Library in Aberystwyth holds a large collection of Brenda Chamberlain's work.

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I went there to meet Chamberlain expert, Jill Piercy.

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Jill, what year did Brenda move to Bardsey?

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Well, after a day trip in, I think it was 45, she moved in 1946.

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And stayed there until 1962.

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She lived very frugally,

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but quite often she was very low on food.

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If she ran out of canvases, she'd paint on newspaper.

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And there's one painting I saw which was the hardboard on the side of the sink, that she painted on.

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Nothing else to paint on, she had to paint.

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These are some of the drawings that she did in Bardsey?

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Yes. Yes. And in fact, these were used in her book, Tide Race.

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And she's drawing shells and fish, the people, presumably, who were on the island?

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Yes, that'll be one of the children on the island.

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The shape of the faces that she tended to draw were all very

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similar, very elongated, with these almond eyes.

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There were very few artists, male or female, who were able to survive just by their work.

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And particularly, there were very few female contemporaries at that time, and very few galleries.

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So you really had to fight to get your work out there.

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Brenda Chamberlain was always a restless figure, who lived on

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a Greek island before coming back to North Wales, where she died in 1971.

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But for some artists, they discover their ideal landscape, and spend their lives exploring it.

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One of those was Kyffin Williams, and the place that inspired him was the uplands of North Wales.

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Permanence of the mountains, the weight of the mountains,

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the light of the mountains and the shapes of the mountains.

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As this light,

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light the other side of the ridges, the darkness of the hill against the bright sky and the bustling clouds.

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And the lines of the walls and the lines of the ridges.

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This is always excitement.

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I suppose one of the reasons why I paint is for excitement.

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Kyffin Williams was born on Anglesey in 1918.

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A doctor suggested he took up painting as a therapy for his epilepsy.

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He spent the next 60 years painting this landscape and the people who live and work in it.

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He became the most famous Welsh artist of his generation.

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At the gallery on Anglesey, dedicated to the artist's work,

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John Smith, who knew Kyffin, described his working methods.

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This was one of his favourite locations.

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This is where he chose to do this pencil drawing,

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with some watercolour in it, as a preparation for a larger painting.

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It is. You can see it's been done very quickly, in a very bold manner.

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It probably took a few minutes, and then he would take it back to

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the studio, or even to the car, and block some of the colours in, these subtle colours.

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The dark tones. Just to give it body and form.

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It's a rock-solid technique, though, isn't it?

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You can see straight away, this is the imprint of a great draughtsman.

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Well, his background was in draughtsmanship, you know,

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the companies he worked for, land agents and estate agents.

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And he knew the structure of buildings.

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And this was a preparation, of course, for this painting?

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That's correct.

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John, this couldn't be anything other than a Kyffin Williams, could it?

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It's a signature painting, isn't it?

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Well, it's a bold statement.

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It's iconic, isn't it?

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The way the paint has been put on, this black lining which he's

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picked up from the drawing which we've just seen there.

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This is a very special technique, of course. You've got

0:26:530:26:57

a palette knife being used, very thick colour, being put on very, very quickly.

0:26:570:27:03

But incredibly skilfully.

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Thick paint is delightful to use.

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And I like that paint, and I like drawing with the brush into thick, palette knife paint.

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It pleases me. It may not please other people, but it pleases me, and that's the important thing.

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I enjoy it.

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And the strong contrast produced by a knife, using some ivory black and

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yellow ochre against some bright, light, flake white sky or something, to me, it is satisfying.

0:27:340:27:42

He liked to get the paint out and mix it very, very quickly.

0:27:420:27:46

Not completely, sometimes.

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And take it up on the palette knife and put it on, almost like butter, what they call impasto.

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He became very, very keen on this technique.

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The main reason was, it gave this lovely, sculptural effect.

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We see all these impasto areas here.

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And it gave a dynamic to it, it was almost like a sculpture.

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The main emphasis was to develop a style of his own.

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The old adage that once you've seen one Kyffin, you've seen them all, is absolute rubbish.

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Painters like Kyffin Williams and many others established

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a popular tradition of Welsh art concerned mainly with landscape.

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In our final programme, we'll be looking at the end of the 20th century, when some artists

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broke with painting and sculpture to challenge the very notion of art itself.

0:28:460:28:51

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

0:29:040:29:06

E-mail [email protected]

0:29:060:29:08

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