Private View Saturday 28th April 2-4pm, upstairs at The Art Shop

On the tenth anniversary of the death of William Brown, The Art Shop & Chapel present a celebration of his legacy. Impregnated by myth – be it Ancient Rome or the idioms of his adopted Wales, his paintings wove the politics of his time and his own travels into the architecture of well-worn rollicking tales. Carnivalesque, eye-wateringly bright and packing a punch, the poet Lucien Suel commented, ‘even his black and white is full of colour.’ Brown was indefatigable, a bear of a man himself, producing a giant oeuvre of paintings, prints and drawings. In repeated images of polar bears, Trojan horses, the Welsh mare Mari Lwyd, man is transformed into beast, alive in his landscape of riotous colour and pattern.

William Brown was born in Toronto, Canada in 1953 and died in Wales, 2008. He was a prolific painter and printmaker whose work was informed by poetry, literature and travel. He collaborated with poets and writers producing glorious black and white lino, wood block and silk sreen prints. William exhibited widely in Britain and overseas with shows in France, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic. His later projects involved sojourns in Galicia, Southern Morocco and the Canadian North. He lived in Bridgend and worked in the Llynfi Valley in South Wales. William Brown’s work is in many Public and Private Collections worldwide.