Tag: Welsh artist

Designer Desire: Wilf Roberts

Montage of Wilf Roberts paintings | H is for Homecredit

England has St Ives, Scotland has Kirkcudbright and Wales has Anglesey. It must be something in the air… or light that draws artists there or inspires their artistic sensibilities. Today, we’re featuring yet another Anglesey-based artist, Wilf Roberts (1941-2016).

His landscapes and cottages feel so Welsh – we really want to visit Anglesey some day soon.

Wilf, himself, explains his inspiration, subject matter and methods best of all:

I’m mainly inspired by Wales as it used to be. I don’t like modernism that much, so I tend to go back to my childhood and remember things as they were. The old cottages and farmhouses are quickly disappearing, but I make use of some of my old sketches to try to capture things as they used to be. I don’t really put anything in paintings that’s in any way modern except telegraph poles.
My painting is about the love and affinity I have with the island and in particular my own square mile at Mynydd Bodafon – for this is where I live and work, its paths are familiar to me and it’s where I’m most comfortable.
I make fairly quick sketches just to get the main outline of what I’m trying to do. All the painting is done back in the studio. I apply the paint with anything that comes to hand – mostly painting knives but also credit cards, my fingers, brushes, a pizza cutter, sticks – really anything I can think of that will get the desired effect.
I’ve often gone to a painting the morning after and scraped it all off simply because I’m not sure about it or don’t like it. It happens to about a third of what I do. You never achieve perfection, but you want to think you can get close to it. If a painting’s going well, somewhere towards the end, the whole thing comes together and makes some kind of sense. That’s when I feel, ‘Yes, I’ve achieved something’. WalesOnline

Portrait of Wilf Roberts

We brought a nice collection of art with us from Yorkshire, few of which seem to sit right in our new cottage. Hopefully, one day, we’ll own a Wilf Roberts piece (or two!) where it will be perfectly at home.

Additional image credits:

Attic Gallery | Martin Tinney Gallery | Invaluable

Designer Desire: Paul Peter Piech

Mosaic of Paul Peter Piech artworks | H is for Home

A week or so ago, we were in an antique shop in Aberystwyth when a framed, limited-edition, lino-cut print poster hanging on the wall caught our eye; it was signed, ‘Paul Peter Piech’. We’d never heard of the artist, so I made a note of the name to check him out when we returned home.

Paul Peter Piech (1920-1996) was a Brooklyn-born artist of Ukrainian parentage. As a GI during the 2nd World War, he’d been posted to Cardiff. Whilst there, he met his future wife, Irene Tompkins. She didn’t fancy the idea of moving to the US, so they remained in the UK, eventually settling in Wales.

Piech’s posters were often on the subjects of equality, justice, human rights, anti-war, anti-racism, the environment and jazz. His artworks were regularly set with quotes from pre-eminent poets and orators such as Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, John F. Kennedy, Harri Webb and Walt Whitman.

In 1959, Piech founded the Taurus Press of Willow Dene in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire. It printed limited-edition books on poetry by the likes of William Blake, Hugo Manning, John Donne, John Cotton, Neil Spratling and Graham Searle. He provided the accompanying illustrations for these publications.

In the 1980s, Piech donated in excess of 2,500 prints and posters to the V&A’s permanent collection. After his death, his family donated an extensive portfolio of his later work to the Regional Print Centre and Art & Design department at Yale College, Wrexham.

Because of his abundance of production (and despite the small print runs), his works are fairly easy to come by; original prints and posters can be found at auction or on eBay and Etsy. Books by and about him can be found on Amazon and Hive.

I’ve been called a Fascist. I’ve been called a Communist. I’ve been called a racist. I’ve been called everything after any of my shows happen because of certain posters, you see. But they can’t pin me down to any ‘isms… I just look at humanity the way it is and then I make a graphic expression of it. The purpose of graphic expression is to realize some truth that they’re missing and to do something about it… I don’t want to sit around and be silent.

Paul Peter Piech

Portrait of Paul Peter Piechcredit

Designer Desire: Claudia Williams

Montage of Claudia Williams artworks | H is for Home

Claudia Williams (b. 1933) is a Welsh fine artist best known for her observational works, often of groups of people and children at the beach and domestic settings. At the age of 16, she attended the Chelsea School of Art.

She once revealed:

I do find people fascinating and I never get tired of painting people in different attitudes and working with different colour schemes.

Her late husband, Gwilym Prichard, credits her with his initiation into painting; he took it up as a ruse to get her attention. The couple and their 4 children have lived and travelled in Wales, England, France and Greece with the pair documenting their existence  through their artworks.

In 2000, Williams and Prichard returned to live in Tenby, south west Wales where she continues to paint in her home studio and exhibit nationwide. There’s a book of her work, Claudia Williams: An Intimate Acquaintance, available on Amazon.

Claudia Williams with her paintings, Tenby, 29 March 2008
Claudia Williams with her paintings, Tenby, 29 March 2008

credit

Additional image credits:

ArtUK | Ask Art | Mutual Art

Designer Desire: Gwilym Prichard

Montage of Gwilym Prichard paintings | H is for Home

Our own humble art collection was built up mainly during our time living in Todmorden. We erred towards Northern Industrial artists during those years, the subject matter suiting the house and Pennine setting perfectly.

We’ve recently moved to Wales and are slowly unpacking belongings – including our paintings. Whilst we still love them, and will try to accommodate them in our little cottage, we also feel that we’ll have to introduce some Welsh art into the mix.

The work of Gwilym Prichard, in particular his buildings and landscapes, is of great interest to us… so we thought that we’d feature him for today’s Designer Desire post.

Alongside his friend Sir Kyffin Williams, Prichard (1931-2015) is considered one of the giants of 20th century Welsh art. He studied art at Normal College, Bangor followed by a diploma at Birmingham College of Art. From 1954, for 11 years, he taught crafts at a school in Llangefni, Anglesey. In his spare time, he painted his local surroundings.

He and his wife, Claudia Williams – also an accomplished artist – also lived & painted in Brittany, Greece before returning to Wales in 1999, settling in Tenby.

Portrat of Gwilym Prichardcredit

Additional image credits:

Blondes Fine Art | Bonhams | Wahoo Art