In conversation with Alastair Laurence.
This is an evening about one of the great British artists of the twentieth century. David Jones was a painter, printmaker, illustrator, poet, and essayist. Kenneth Clark, T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky among others called him a genius.
Dr Peter Wakelin is the curator of a brilliant and beautiful exhibition of the paintings and drawings of Jones currently taking place at Y Gaer, Brecknock Museum and Gallery, Brecon. In the run up to this evening we suggest that you might want to see Hill Rhythms and this glorious artwork for yourself. This is open seven days a week and has free entry.
At the heart of Hill Rhythms is work done by David Jones in the 1920s when he lived at Capel–y–ffin in the Black Mountains. There he lived in a former monastery, with a Roman Catholic community brought together by the sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill. This period was for Jones a ‘new beginning’. Here he recovered from the traumas of the First World War where he was a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and fought at the battle for Mametz Wood. All that Jones did after this period in his life was influenced by his immersion in the landscape of the Llanthony Valley. It had an influence on his modernist masterpiece, the long poem In Parenthesis.
Dr Peter Wakelin has published books on the artists Charles Burton, Roger Cecil, Falcon Hildred and Sally Moore and has written for Art Review, Modern Painters and The Guardian. Among his exhibitions are Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art at the Royal West of England Academy and Romanticism in the Welsh Landscape at MoMA Machynlleth. He was formerly Director of Collections at Amgueddfa Cymru-Museum Wales and Secretary of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. He is President of the Contemporary Art Society for Wales.
