Book review: Pursued by a Bear: The Art of William Brown by Peter Wakelin

Tony Curtis

This fully illustrated monograph on the Canadian/Welsh artist William Brown is to be welcomed. He is deserving of remembrance and a reassessment; and in this book is served well by Peter Wakelin, one of our best writers on the visual arts.

I knew William Brown, but not very well. In 2007, he phoned to ask me if I would open his exhibition at the Washington Gallery in Penarth. Of course, I agreed. I thought that this Canadian big bear of a man, who had moved to Bridgend, was an interesting artist and a force to be reckoned with.

I went over to look at the work before the official opening: bright, big paintings, strutting and confident, welcoming and challenging. I wrote a poem to read at the opening; he generously gave me a painting, a circus bear.

That was typical of the man; he gave people presents, often woodcuts. They are bold and iconic; it is tempting to think of them as visual elements in the nature of Inuit carvings, naïve in their depiction of buildings and creatures, but subtle in their restructuring of the world.

This incomer to Wales brought with him brown bears, caribou, polar bears and the mythical Loup Garou. William arrived here “pursued by bears”. Peter Wakelin usefully fills in biographical details that many of William’s admirers may not have known. Born in Toronto of Scots parents, he was a teenage father, had an interrupted formal education and was an autodidact with wide-ranging interests.

“Story-telling – and listening were both inculcated early and I seized on stories/myth/legends/folk customs…I cannot recall a time when I did not make pictures.”

William records nothing about his education, though he did work at an art foundry. Peter Wakelin explains that William was a school absconder, a persistent runaway. He took to drink, had another woman and with her emigrated to England in 1977. He worked in factories and then as a technician at Somerset College of Arts and Technology. There, he began to explore sculpture and printmaking.

A third partner came into his life and he married in 1983, then moved to London. Back in Devon before long, he began to run workshops for schoolchildren and through this work he met his last wife, Carys. It was Carys’s appointment to a headship at a school in Wales which brought William here and into the lives of Welsh artists and writers. He took to our country and became one of us.

Canadian Northern world

William had brought with him a distinctive Canadian Northern world with black bears and reindeer, some of them blue. His bears were all colours; some of them, like the bear in our painting, are circus performers, with stars on their fur and hearts, and some were on wheels.

There is also the threatening Loup Garou – a wolf on the prowl: a Canadian werewolf. Crossing to us, they join Welsh lovespoons, terraces of Valleys houses, the “Venus” of Blaengwynfri. Hobby horses which also serve as Trojan horses move on wheels; they wait at the city gates.

From time he spent in Galicia, Tunisia and Morocco, there are desert scenes with lush palm trees and threatening military jets. Jets are seen crashing into the Twin Towers. There are bombers over Wales, over the desert, over New York. Iwan Bala said of William, “Bold colours, clear, powerful iconographics, and a unique body of work replete with narratives.”

This faux naïve painter was sensitive to his adopted country and to world events. He exhibited both with The Welsh Group and the 56 Group in the UK and Europe; he became one of us.

He said, “A defining trait of human nature is, I believe the imagination – at once the alleviation of tedium, the bringing of a sense of fun and maybe, just maybe, illumination.”

In his paintings and numerous prints, this entertaining, diverting artist welcomes us in, then delivers a punch.

There’s a sad horse which is a Mari Lwyd brought back to life in many works. It often stands on two legs and faces us, asking us to open the door, bowing so that it may enter. Horses may be blue, white, green; bears and walruses shift-shape in Welsh landscapes and townscapes.

Dreamscape

Brown’s visions are not bound by shared reality: he leads us out of the mundane, the recognisable and takes us to a new world which is also recognisable. Much takes place under a cold, silvery moon. It is a dreamscape, the like of which was seldom seen in Welsh galleries, apart from the work of Iwan Bala and Tony Goble. He was always, to the very end, an embellisher of the facts, a weaver of narratives and creator of dramatic imaginings.

It’s only in the last year that our Brown Bear has come to this house. We’d given it to our granddaughter, Megan. She’d gone to university and then our Bristol family had moved out of the city. One homeless bear.

But when a work returns, it is a real second coming. We pass our bear each time we use the stairs in our new house. It is uplifting: centre stage, curtains drawn, under that spotlight of a silver moon. And the colours: William Brown brought so much colour into our lives; his paintings are bold and loud and joyful and profound.

William died the year after that Penarth exhibition; he was fifty-five. His grave is in St. Teilo’s, Merthyr Mawr, near Bridgend. The headstone is as remarkable as any other artist’s I’ve seen. Its rough-edged Welsh slate has a Loup Garou wolf and a heart beneath his name, Carys’s name, and dates. And there’s a Canadian maple leaf.

That is a fitting memorial and this new book is a fitting celebration of an artist we must keep close to us.

Persued by a Bear is published by Parthian and is available here and at all good bookshops