Book review: Championing Artists in Wales by David Moore

Jon Gower

Building up an art collection as excellent and locally relevant as the one now housed in Brecon’s Y Gaer, the refurbished Museum, Art Gallery and Library has involved a great deal of tasteful buying.

It has also required some detective work and the occasional act of serendipity as works are tracked down.

A driving force behind some many of the acquisitions has been the Brecknock Art Trust, established in 2000 to support the expansion of a collection of international importance, not least for its holdings of modern and contemporary work.

The cover art, showing a tousle between two doppelgängers by Sarah Snazell, an Abergavenny painter who died at an early age, shows the first work purchased by the trust and it can be seen as a sort of statement of intent.

It’s a landscape work depicting two women who can’t see any of the world around them and is apparently modelled on the artist herself, adding to its complexities.

Arresting work

As Peter Lord has pointed out, women were often shown in paintings of the Welsh landscape to seemingly emasculate the country. But in Dopplegänger the women are muscular, and being perfectly and equally matched, there might never be a winner.

Championing Artists in Wales is chock-full of such arresting work, all beautifully reproduced and thematically arranged. There are plenty of landscapes, as one might expect, given the magnetic attraction such features as Bannau Brycheiniog and the Black Mountains held for artists down the centuries, not least the area near Capel-y-Ffin where Eric Gill and David Jones found ample sources of inspiration.

So we find examples of work by the Neath painter Wil Roberts and Roy Powell, who taught art in Brecon High School and hauntingly engaging work by Roger Cecil who lived in Abertillery.

Depicting ‘A Magical Winter Night with Angharad on the Brecon Beacons’ Cecil does so with very subtle suggestions of geological lines and the shape of a woman’s body lying on a bed of snow. It’s almost the antithesis of what would first come to mind if you thought of a landscape painting, so it’s all the more arresting for being so.

Patterning echoes

And of course man-made objects and buildings have their places too, from bridges spanning the river Usk through corn mills to brightly marvellous accounts of the creation of the Gaer cultural complex itself.

For these, Roger Reese used sweeps of coloured pencil to meld together the shapes found in photographic images of the building’s transformation which ‘due to their width, have a cinematic feel.’

They certainly have vivid touch of Technicolor about them, offering a Panavision take on the changes wrought in the former Brecknock Shire Hall.

Equally colourful is John Uzzell Edwards’ ‘Bird Lives I’ which echoes the patterning of illuminated Celtic manuscripts even as it conjures up the pulse, beat and vibrancy of Charlie Parker’s jazz saxophone.

It reminds one of the jaunty couplet about Parker by the Beat poet Roger McGough: ‘He breathed in air, he blew out light/ Charlie Parker was my delight.’ Edwards seems to do the same with oil on canvas.

Kindled desire

And taking about colour you’ll also learn about the London drawing master, William Payne, who painted a bridge over the river Tarrell but also gave his name for the neutral tint of paint called “Payne’s grey.”

And see works of art such as Ivor Davies’ ‘Taranis/Thunder God’ and Shirley Jones’ ‘Etched Out’ where the red pigment employed by both is made of earth collected from the Epynt, where fifty four farming families were dispossesed to create a military training area during the Second World War.

The book also contains a section on art about industry, featuring some of the area’s best known painters such as Josef Herman, who created much of his work in a former pop factory in Ystradgynlais and Valerie Ganz who, like Herman, drew and represented coal miners, in her case up to and including those who worked at Tower Colliery near Hirwaun, being the last deep mine in Wales, which closed in 2008.

As art books go this is an out-and-out bargain as it’s available for a tenner. It’s beautifully produced and arranged so that turning its pages you feel as if you’ve been guided gently through a very fine art gallery, even as it kindles a proper desire to go to get on the bus to Brecon to see the real things. A quarter of a century’s worth of art collecting? Very well worth this sort of elegant, meaningful celebration.

Championing Artists in Wales: 25 Years of the Brecknock Arts Trust by David Moore is available from all good bookshops.