Tag: mid Wales

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My Donation to the Shelter Cymru Art Auction 2016

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I have just donated this painting “Farm Under Velvet Mountain” to this year’s Shelter Cymru Art Auction – always happy to support such a worthy cause.

“A must for any art lover, the Annual Welsh Art Auctions are amongst the biggest fundraising events in the Shelter Cymru calendar and are always a great evening out.”

http://sheltercymru.org.uk

Some words about this painting –

“This is an oil painting of the Table Mountian in Mid Wales.
I painted this because I loved the colours of blues, turquoise and purple which blend pleasingly with the blue-greens and terracottas of the trees and land.

Nature unearths such lovely rich colours and casts them wide in lovely complementary chromatic patchworks.
I would say this painting is inspired like so many of my mid-Wales landscapes by one of my favourite painters, Robert Bevan, whose landscapes have influenced how I paint this type of hilly upland landscape as opposed to the landscape I paint of Gower Peninsula which is usually in my own unique refractionist style which in itself influenced by expressionism.

I love the idea that colour expresses emotion, transports and alleviates the self and a creates an emotional response to a place depicted in a painting. Ideally I like to transport the viewer to the place so that the viewer somehow feels they are there or have been there in some sense. That is somehow familiar to them.
In this painting I hoped to transport one to soft lazy warmnesss of summer in the fields of Mid Wales. The velvety feel of the Table Mountain helps heighten this feeling of softness. The warm summer breeze can often give this sense of snoozy softness and I hope some of this is conveyed in this painting with the manicure trees like hairdryed Bouffants and the dusty dryness of the terracotta.”

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Grey Clouds over Black Mountain – a Brecon Beacons painting

Brecon Becons Painting
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Grey Clouds Over Black Mountain (Oil on Linen Canvas 100×80 cm) 

This oil painting is of an area that inspires many of my landscapes, the Brecon Beacons in Mid Wales.
Unlike most of my other landscape paintings of the Beacons which paint areas of the Black Mountains, this painting is on the opposite side of the central Brecon Beacons from the Black Mountains, in an area called, somewhat confusingly, the Black Mountain.

The Black Mountains are more rural and more farmland dotted whereas parts of the Black Mountain are quite desolate and coarse in their moorland bleakness. One area seems generally more cultivated compared to the wildness of the other. This is why I love both in different ways. I love the Carmarthen Fan as this is more wild and unkempt although this soon gives way to the farm lands and patchworked fields like the other side of the central Beacons, as the earthy colours of agricultural Carmarthenshire also slide down the sides of these great glaciated monuments and into the the dim distance as they do on the other side too.

I love to convey some of this “giving way” to this naturally quilted farm land from these hard glaciated rocks of the Black Mountain in this painting. From the sandy fair illusion of softness in the far heights to the lush fruity colours in the near distance. I have also attempted to show the wondrous movement of clouds one experiences throughout the Brecon Beacons too, rolling their awesome way like herds of fluffy sky giants, tickling the tips of hills and caressing scarred ridges as they go. The movement of these ever-changing clouds over hills and mountains produces this amazing silverly grey light that when illuminated by the peeping, fleeting sun makes everything more more clear and the depth of perception much deeper.

It appears to hold everything in is wrapped clear focus. Almost magnifies the clarity of our onlooking vision. This makes the foreground colours deepen and seem more rich. It is a particular feature of upland Welsh areas, this brilliant luminescent light. Always changing and bestowing it’s chromatic good fortune on whatever it traverses.

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Perpetual Light

 

perpetual light

“Perpetual Light”

People have commented variously how this painting “captures sunshine”, “reminds me of hope”…and sometimes comments inform you about what the painting evokes in others and in a sense what it is about, almost.. The subject material here is one of my very favourite chapels in Wales. Not only is it the smallest but I also love it’s crooked bell tower. Mostly, I love how it is bathed in traditional Welsh white, unusual in that most chapels are not these days. This white helps catch the brillance of the sunshine, which puts it in start contrast to the “gloom” of the gravestones.Personally, unlike most perhaps, I love graveyards, particularly old ones; I love the gravestones and how they tell a thousand stories of people who have passed on but still “alive” in the memories and stories left behind. Some other comments have mentioned how the painting rises above the death association. I think it has done so because there is an intrinsic hope in sunshine isn’t there – that is what I have tried to capture in the sun.  It is also clear that light and dark need each other, shadow and brilliance. Despair and hope. Beyond the graves there is a light, and the title of the painting points to a Christian reference, mentioned in relation to those who have moved on, “Let perpetual light shine upon him/her…”, so there is hope in this message, for some, of eternal light beyond the grave.