Angela Maddock is an artist/maker, writer and teacher. Her particular interest is thread based practice and arts and health. She has a PhD from the Royal College of Art and is a King’s Artist with King’s College, London. Angela is Honorary Research Fellow in Textiles at Swansea College of Art, where she was previously as senior lecturer.
Non Taylor – Children’s Book Illustrator is married to Pete, of the comic books and daughter of Alan and Gill Figg, what an artistic family.
Little did I know that we had in Swansea our very own Comic Book Creator, who is better known as ‘This man Pete’, photographed here in his Llangyfelach studio.
Daniel Trivedy winner of the Gold Medal for Art at the 2019 National Eisteddfod at his home in Skewen near Swansea.
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 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’ 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 was awarded the peoples choice for his self portrait at the 2020 Glynn Vivian Gallery, he is from Cwmtwrch in the Swansea Valley.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Mike Hill studied Wild Life Illustration at Carmarthen Art College. He works from home with a studio overlooking Swansea Bay, where he regularly walks and gathers items washed ashore for his work. His studio is full of the natural history of Swansea Bay, enough to fill a museum and made a fascinating visit. Winner of the 2nd Prize in the Glynn Vivian Open 2019 with Swansea Beach Tar and Swansea Beach Plastic.
Photographed while living at Llanfairyngornwy.
In Search of Angels.
A wreath of Celtic Angels with words by R.S. Thomas.
This series of six memento mori prints where made for the exhibition ‘The Great the Good and the Dead’ held at the Ceri Richards Gallery, Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea University in January 2003. Embedded in the prints are words from the Notebook poems of Dylan Thomas written, in his school exercise books at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands, Swansea. For this I must Thank Llew Thomas.
From top left,
1/ Browns Hotel Laugharne, Dylan and Caitlin’s table.
2/ The back bedroom, 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, The Uplands, Swansea.
3/ Cwmdonkin Park, looking across to Mumbles Head.
4/ The Death Mask, The Dylan Thomas Centre, Somerset Place, Swansea.
5/ 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Uplands, Swansea.
6/ Tumbling Terraces, from The Uplands to the Sea.
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 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.
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 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.