Kyffin

As you walk down from Penlanffos you are looking down into the valley. In the morning you are also facing the sunrise. The picture above is a view I saw of a Robin exercising his voice from a gatepost with a field of sheep behind. There are vapour trails in the sky as this is a main route for the Atlantic traffic to USA.

Today we went to the beach at Llansteffan for a Sunday morning walk with my daughter and son in law along with 3 of the grandchildren and 3 dogs. It was a bit of a circus with dogs and children falling everywhere. It was also bitterly cold with an Easterly wind. It certainly blew out some of the cobwebs.

I watched a program on television the other night, “Rolf on Welsh Art”. He really is a great communicator and an excellent artist. The subject was Kyffin Williams who is probably the most famous Welsh artist.
Rolf did a portrait in the style of Kyffin which was very good. Although Kyffin was obviously very successful and had a good eye his paintings in the main for me can be a bit depressing. I know some of his characters are fun and he obviously had a sense of humour but maybe it’s his colours, the heavy greys. Of course the greys are a reflection of the slate grey hard North Wales he lived in but there are other colours in the landscape as well. Also there is very little variety in his work he had a definite formula for painting which changes little.

At the end of the day who am I to offer any criticism? He could obviously paint and paint very well but he is not my first choice. I would probably go for Augustus John or his sister Gwen.

Of course they spent little time actually painting in Wales so maybe it should be Kyffin after all.

There are of course very many fine artists living and working in Wales currently the website below has some examples:

http://www.walesartists.co.uk/