Daniel Trivedy winner of the Gold Medal for Art at the 2019 National Eisteddfod at his home in Skewen near Swansea.
Author Archives: Ceri
Su Roberts
Photographed in her Cardiff Studio.
“I explore emotions. Feelings and sensations. My work deals with the idea of beauty. It seeks to draw in or repel the viewer the encounter with the surface or tactility. I am interested in womanliness and where this leads.” – Su Roberts
Gayle Rogers PhD
Gayle Rogers works predominantly as a plein air artist, specialising in drawing. In 2014 she created the Workers Gallery in Ynyshir, in the Rhondda in the former local library building. Through the Gallery she provides a space for arts and community projects, exhibitions and live events. She is photographed here during the recent ‘ Ynyshir; 25 mile Radius’ exhibition by photographer David Hurn.
Chris Williams MA MRBS
Chris Williams’ sculptural work is influenced by his background in furniture design and making. His work explores the forms derived from complex scientific and astronomical theory. In 2018 he was commissioned by St Fagans Museum to design and make the Bardic Chair for the National Eisteddfod. His workshop is situated behind the Workers Gallery in Ynyshir
Dafydd Williams
Dafydd Williams was awarded the peoples choice for his self portrait at the 2020 Glynn Vivian Gallery, he is from Cwmtwrch in the Swansea Valley.
Sue Williams
Professor Sue Williams was appointed Programme Director of the BA/MA Fine Arts at the Swansea College of Art in 2018. She has spent the last thirty years challenging the boundaries of figurative painting receiving many National and International awards and is photographed here in here in her Bute Street Studio in Cardiff.
Evelyn Wolstenholme
Evelyn Wolstenholme is a documentary photographer. She won First Prize in the Glynn Vivian Gallery, Open competition in 2019 with this work on the theme of Life and Death. She studied at the Swansea school of Art with a First Class B.A degree and now lives and works in Swansea.
Elysium Gallery and Bar
Those were the days when you could rest your arms on your favourite bar the only one in town with its own art gallery. I only wish this Corvid 19 virus would go away and we could all return and join Elysium Gallery Director Jonathan Powell. It’s your round Johnathan!
Bernard Mitchell
Frances Richards – Glynn Vivian Gallery – An Artist Apart
It is very unusual for me to visit an exhibition three times, but that is what happened when I saw for the first time the work of Frances Richards who was married to Ceri. I visited their home in Edith Grove, London, in 1966. I know now what I had missed, for she was not around, and I was only too pleased to be spending time and photographing the artist I most admired.
Frances was born in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent in 1901, studied at the Burslem School of Art and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where she met Ceri Richards.
She became Head of Design at Camberwell and taught at Chelsea School of Art. She lived in London until her death in 1985.
Her beautiful intricately embroidered pictures were both lyrical and symbolic in their mood. Shortly before Ceri’s death she worked on a series of unique images of elongated female forms and children set in a dream-like landscape of solitude. She had many friends who were artists and poets, one remarked, “ Ceri is a major talent, but you are a minor genius”, but like Ceri she was a quiet, modest and self confident lady.
Untitled
the mother stands
the child also
the flowers with them
the same. Flowers
children and mothers;
appearing and remaining
returning and standing
waiting. What for?
it is a mystery
and will remain so.
Frances Richards
I would like to thank Mel and Rhiannon Gooding for the extracts from their lovely catalogue.
Bernard Mitchell. 2020.
Pieces of a Jigsaw: Portraits of Artists and Writers of Wales
A New Book by Bernard Mitchell – Available Now.
An unprecedented collection of photographic portraits of notable characters within the arts community in Wales, Pieces of a Jigsaw is based on Bernard Mitchell’s ongoing Welsh Arts Archive project. The project began in 1966 with a series of portraits of the Swansea friends of Dylan Thomas, including the artists Ceri Richards and Alfred Janes, the poet Vernon Watkins, and the composer Daniel Jones. The collection kept growing and now features many leading artists and writers who have significantly contributed to Welsh culture in the late twentieth century, including Will Roberts, Josef Herman, Max Boyce, Jan Morris, Ernest Zobole, Emyr Humphreys and Gwyneth Lewis.
Bernard Mitchell was born in Morriston, Swansea, in 1947. His interest in photography began at junior school with a cardboard pinhole camera. The present of a Kodak 127 and various cameras throughout school helped him develop his knowledge and interest in the fundamentals of photography. After leaving school, he studied photography at the Berkshire college of art Reading Before joining Thomson Regional Newspapers as an indentured photojournalist. Following a long career in newspapers, Bernard returned to Swansea in 2003 to study for a Masters degree in photography at Swansea Metropolitan University. In 2016 Bernard gifted his archive of photographs of artists and writers of Wales to the Richard Burton Archive at Swansea University.
Video: Bernard Mitchell’s – Pieces of a Jigsaw. Made by Film Students at the University of Solent
Published by PARTHIAN BOOKS, the book is available now:
Buy the Book – Pieces or a Jigsaw: Portraits of Artists and Writers of Wales
Karen MacKinnon – Glynn Vivian Gallery – Swansea Stories
The best Swansea Story, is that we have a brand new fully functioning, modern and as beautiful as ever Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. It’s like a breath of fresh air, not only do we have our new curator Karen Mackinnon, a staff who are proud and only to willing to help, social events of an evening, and a café where I am seen meeting my friends for a rather nice coffee. I visited the Frances Richards exhibition three times, it was a joy to see her delicate work, I made a Christmas card of her Angels. So thank you Mel Gooding for letting us see the work of the lady I never met, when visiting Edith Grove to photograph her husband Ceri Richards. An artist whose work I admired and discovered as a young man in the Glynn Vivian Gallery.
The exhibition ‘Swansea Stories’ perhaps one of the largest ever put on in the Glynn, was a very clever way of showing the wealth of the permanent collection, as well increasing the footfall. Many the pictures from the storerooms, that had not been seen for some time, and so many new discoveries and old favourites. One, almost monochrome oil high up on the wall in the main gallery, made me take to the photocopied list. Yes, as I suspected it was an early Glenys Cour (The Pool, Cefn Bryn, 1963) and what a complete change from the colours we expect to see in a Glenys Cour. The exhibition included to my surprise, tucked away in an alcove in the atrium, two of my early portraits of those two friends from Neath and Ystradgynlais, Will Roberts and Josef Herman.
Let us hope that we can see it once more when this lock down, virus thing has gone and I can go again to meet my friends for a coffee and see an exhibition at the Glynn.
Bernard Mitchell. June 2020.
The South Wales Miners Archive – Hendrefoillan – Swansea
The South Wales Miners Archive is a hidden treasure in what looks like the old coach house? In the Grounds of Hendrefoillan House, part of Swansea University Archive and home to the Victorian Industrialist and Novelist Amy Dillwyn, I will let the pictures do the rest.
Jamie Ried – G.S. Artists Gallery – Dragon’s Revenge
This was my first visit to the G.S. Artists Gallery in High Street, in Swansea, the home for progressive artist and I wish I had found it before.
The first time I took a photograph off a television screen, was on the editors television, the only one in the office ‘The First Steps For Mankind’ was the headline, half of the front page, a blurry pic, but I was there! As Max Boyce once said.
The second time that I took a televised portrait, was of the punk pop-art, artist and anarchist Jamie Reid, he was not in the gallery at the moment.
Jamie Reid was born in London in 1947 and one of his best known works is the Sex Pistols Album ‘Never mind the Bollocks, Here are the Sex Pistols’, (words: Tate Modern). He now lives in Liverpool, the second capital of Wales, so that might explain ‘Dragon’s Revenge’. Looking after the exhibition was G.S. Artist Abigail Fraser.
www.galeriesimpsonswansea.com/tag/art-gallery
Bernard Mitchell
Alys Conran
Alys Conran published her first novel ‘Pidgeon’ in 2017 and was awarded Wales Book of the Year, her second novel ‘Dignity’ was published in 2019. She teaches creative writing at Bangor University and is photographed here at her home in Bethesda.
Trezza Azzopardi
Trezza Azzopardi was born in Cardiff, she has published four novels and been translated into more than twenty languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia and lives in Norwich, where I photographed her at the Cathedral.
www.blakefriedmann.co.uk/trezza-azzopardi
Jason Gregory and Andre Stitt
Jason Gregory was born in Tonypandy in 1974 and graduated from Cardiff School of Art with a MFA Fine Art in 2017, he now lives and works in Porthcawl.
He was joint winner of the BEEP Painting prize with Kelly Ewing in 2018.He is photographed here in the Elysium Gallery/Bar in High Street Swansea with Andre Stitt, (right).
Tom Morris
Tom Morris working in his Elysium Gallery Artists Studio in Orchard Street, Swansea.
Stephen Wilyeo
Steven Wilyeo studied fine art at Aberystwyth University, School of Art, he describes his work as abstract expressionist a relationship of form and colour, a manifestation of his mind and soul laid out in paint.
He is photographed in his studio and joint exhibition with Euros Rowlands, ‘ The Stillness of Chaos’, at the Elysium Gallery studio complex in College Street, Swansea in January 2020.
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Euros Rowlands
Photographed at the joint exhibition with Steven Wilyeo, ‘The Stillness of Chaos’, at the Elysium Studio complex, January 2020.
Euros Rowlands graduated from Aberystwyth University School of Art in 1992. He has been a professional musician, teacher and now works as an artist based at Elysium Studios in College Street, Swansea.
His work is created through a combination of paint, photographs, magazine and advert cuttings, a process of memory through this visual echo.
Fran Williams
Fran Williams, is a Mixed Media Artist who works from her Elysium Gallery studio in Orchard Street, Swansea.
www.elysiumgallery.com/ fran- williams