Culture

‘Last Dance on the Hills’: Final works of celebrated Welsh painter go on display

07 Sep 2026 4 minute read

‘Slippers’. Image courtesy of Celf Gallery and The Estate of Kevin Sinnott

Nation.Cymru Staff

The final works of one of Wales’ most celebrated contemporary painters are now on display in a poignant exhibition following his death aged 78.

Kevin Sinnott’s Last Dance on the Hills – Dawns Olaf ar y Bryniau is now on show at Cardiff’s Celf Gallery, featuring predominantly new work selected from his studios.

The Celf Gallery team made regular visits to his Pontycymer and Pont-y-rhyl studios to select works produced since Sinnott’s previous solo exhibition ‘Selected Works’ with Celf in 2024.

Though the exhibition was initially planned as simply the next in Sinnott’s repertoire, “an exciting new chapter”, Celf Gallery shared that it now stands as “a final testament to an artist who remained utterly committed to painting until the end”.

Born in Sarn, near Bridgend, in 1947, Sinnott became a defining figure in contemporary Welsh art, with his paintings drawing heavily on the people, landscapes and communities of the south Wales valleys.

‘Dreams Come and Go’. Image courtesy of Celf Gallery and The Estate of Kevin Sinnott

Throughout the 1970s he made a name for himself in London, but returned to Wales in 1993 and established his studio in Pont-y-rhyl.

Writing of his Welsh upbringing, Sinnott said: “A young Welsh student recently asked me if I had grown up in an artistic home. I said I hadn’t.

“She looked around the studio and thought for a while and wondered how that could be. I recollected how in the early sixties the youth clubs of South Wales in association with the LEAs used to look out for us kids.

“For a while there were art and music classes. I could draw and paint, but I had left school early and these places provided mentors, leaders, and characters, that didn’t look or walk the other way. ‘Oh. The community, then’, my Welsh visitor said.

“After some twenty-five years away with more than a few ups and downs, I returned to that very community. It was initially a difficult return, not being exactly what my wife and I had wanted to do.

“In some ways it was more of a retreat from the challenges that my ambitions demanded I should always meet. Then, the returning of this native provided many more challenges.

“The artistic benefits, however, during the last fifteen years have been immense.

“The inspiration which I have gratefully, if not always humbly, received from my immediate environment, has sometimes seemed like a reward for coming home – the ‘fatted calf’ even.

“A reward for the recognition and acknowledgement of my debt to the place in which my peculiar adventure began.”

‘Hanging Out’. Image courtesy of Celf Gallery and The Estate of Kevin Sinnott

His works are held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum, and the National Museum of Wales, where his 1993 painting Running Away with the Hairdresser has become one of his best-known works.

Of his previous works, Celf Gallery noted they “constitute a powerful exploration of memory, community and belonging. His hills and valleys became not simply landscape, but a stage for the emotional and psychological life of Wales.”

However, while many of Sinnott’s best-known paintings explored the life and landscapes around him, the gallery said the works in Last Dance on the Hills turn the focus more inward, reflecting on memory, identity and the passage of time.

“In the recent oils, the thick, urgent linework and bold pigments reveal an artist who continued to push the boundaries of narrative painting,” they wrote.

The final paintings include a self-portrait, alongside works reflecting on Sinnott’s family and the communities that inspired him throughout his career, retaining the bold colours, vivid passion, and emotional storytelling that characterised his work.

The gallery shared their gratitude to Kevin Sinott’s family “for their support and generosity in bringing this exhibition to fruition, and for allowing us to celebrate an extraordinary artist.”

Kevin Sinnott: Last Dance on the Hills – Dawns Olaf ar y Bryniau will show from 5 September to 11 October at Celf Gallery (2, Roath Park Hall, Cardiff, CF24 3NA). More information is available on the gallery’s site here.

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