Artist wins prestigious award for paintings of south Wales valleys at night

Three large paintings of the south Wales valleys at night have won the prestigious Josef Herman Award at the National Eisteddfod.

Anthony Evans, originally from Cross Hands near Llanelli, received the People’s Choice award, chosen by visitors to Y Lle Celf in a closed ballot, in a short ceremony on Saturday afternoon.

Officials at Y Lle Celf, said to be the biggest temporary art exhibition in Europe, said votes for Anthony’s work had poured in from the first day.

The paintings were acrylic on large canvas. One showed Pontypridd’s rugby ground in Sardis Road lit up by floodlights. The green pitch surrounded by darkened streets dimly lit by moonlight.

Anthony lives and works in Cardiff and is a member of Old Library Artists; an artist led cooperative based in Canton. He worked as a teacher for several years before becoming a full time artist in 1990.

He uses a wide range of media, from acrylic to assemblages and says his style is driven by an interest in landscape and story-telling.

The People’s Choice is one of the Eisteddfod’s most popular annual prizes.

Popular

With the support of the Josef Herman Art Foundation, £500 is awarded to the artist responsible for creating the most popular piece or collection of work.

The Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru, a registered charity, was founded in 2002 to encourage, through exhibitions and by awarding grants, the public appreciation of the visual arts and to honour Herman’s legacy.

Herman was a highly regarded Polish-British painter who influenced contemporary art, particularly in the United Kingdom. He was part of a generation of central and eastern European Jewish refugee artists who emigrated to escape Nazi persecution.

He escaped to France and then Britain where he first lived in Glasgow. While in Scotland he drew and painted scenes of Jewish life from Poland which only became more widely known in the 1980s.

Herman later moved to Ystradgynlais, a mining community in south Wales where he was fondly nicknamed “Joe Bach”.