Kim Howells
Blog posts in total 10
Posts
Filming Great Lives with Molly Parkin
Being part of the crew filming Molly Parkin for Great Lives on BBC Wales has shredded my nerves. She may be in her 80th year but being close to her when she's recounting details of her turbulent life or expounding upon her philosophy is like trying to live with a machine-gun emplacement in the h...
Leaving the 20th century
The fourth and final film in the Framing Wales series has been the most problematic. Who to put in and who to leave out? It's impossible to decide in terms of worth or quality or reputation. There are so many fine artists working the length and breadth of Wales. When I bump into friends in th...
Fear and loathing in Llandudno
My heart was not filled with joy as I drove with the film crew to Llandudno. The very name of that exquisite Edwardian resort is associated in my mind with its role as the venue for the annual conferences of political parties and trade-unions. I was always a notoriously bad attender; I'd rath...
Enriching the soul of Wales
Having heard people describe Ifor Davies as the Grand Old Man of Welsh art, I thought I'd met the wrong Ifor Davies when I was introduced to him at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. We were due to film him the following morning for the fourth film in our series but, far from looking like he ought to have been preserved in one of the museum's glass cases, alongside a Bronze Age hunter or a Victorian milkman, he was probably the snappiest dresser in a room swimming with well-heeled Welsh crachach. He wore a long jacket you couldn't buy, even in Wales's finest gentlemen's outfitters. It was styled half-way between Darth Vader's cloak and the hand-stitched, velvet creations sported by the flashiest, best-paid Teds in the Aberdare of my youth. This was someone who reminded me that artists are supposed to look different. They are supposed to have style and verve. Ifor has it in shovelfuls: no-less than you'd expect from an artist who has worked and exhibited around the world since the 1960s. Ifor has a large studio in a converted grain-store in Penarth. Travel due north on the A470 and you come to another conversion serving as an artist's studio, this time a cavernous former chapel in Blaenau Ffestiniog. It houses the sought-after wooden sculptures of David Nash. So sought-after, in fact, that we arrived to film him shortly after crates of them had just been shipped-off to art dealers in Germany. Many of the rest, he explained, were being exhibited at Britain's premier sculpture show, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. North of Bridgend, our film crew invaded a studio in another remarkable chapel conversion, nestling in a former mining valley that now resembles a glorious wooded Alpine glen. Here we filmed Kevin Sinnott, born down the road in Sarn, painting his huge, life-affirming canvases and giving us his personal variation on a theme common to the lives of so many artists connected with Wales since the Second World War. It runs along these lines: talented youngster leaves Wales to study at prestigious London art school, often the Royal College. Talented graduate becomes famous and sought-after artist. Successful artist gets passionate yen to return to Wales, often after becoming parents or after suffering the roller-coaster tendencies of the London art market. Money is scraped together sufficient to convert abandoned churches, schools, farmhouses, barns and warehouses. Drawing, painting and sculpture resume within them. Crumbling buildings are rescued. New beauty and intellectual vibrancy emerge from them. Wales has its soul enriched. The final episode of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 17 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.
Proximity, remoteness and solitude in Welsh art
Remoteness, I discovered in making this series, is a geographical description that must be used carefully in Wales. Compared with, say, France or Italy, nowhere in Wales is remote from anywhere else in Wales. Geographically, we are the same size as the small American state of New Jersey but with less than a third of New Jersey's population. True, we can experience problems with our physical communications but, theoretically, the place is small enough for ideas, styles and trends to spread in a matter of hours, rather than years. Almost no-where in Wales is impossibly remote from some of the greatest urban centres and markets of England. Cardiff and Swansea are much closer to London than is Newcastle, Glasgow or Liverpool. Much of north Wales and mid Wales is within convenient driving distances of Manchester and Birmingham. When Surrealist art began appearing in Britain in the 1930s, Welsh artists saw it and debated it as quickly as artists from any other part of these islands. Indeed, the finest surrealist artist that Britain produced was from the mining village of Dunvant, near Swansea. His name was Ceri Richards and he was nothing less than a phenomenon in the international art world. We went to Dunvant for the third programme in our series and discovered that Richards had been nurtured in a working class community that valued music and art as highly as it did honesty, hard work and Christianity. Dunvant was the antithesis of insularity. It was a village excited by creativity and Richards had been part of an extraordinary creative milieu generated by the Swansea School of Art, the town's Glynn Vivian Gallery, the Kardomah Restaurant and Dylan Thomas' favourite pubs. More than his contemporaries in Swansea, Ceri Richards was influenced by the work of Picasso and Matisse and, in 1962, he represented Britain at the world's foremost artfest, the Venice Biennale, where he was a prizewinner. But he was far from being the only Welsh artists to be influenced profoundly by artists from Europe and beyond. In the 1940s, for example, young Welsh artists were able to visit the studios of two central European artists who escaped Nazi oppression to settle and work in Wales: Heinz Koppel in Dowlais and Josef Herman in Ystradgynlais. Others, like Kyffin Williams, and a host of talented young Welsh artists, lived in London and other English cities but concentrated the central thrust of their art on Wales and Welsh subjects. This exchange of influences, ideas and experiences is the story of 20th century art across the developed world. It had as dynamic an influence on Welsh art as it did on the art of New York, Paris, London and St Ives. Paradoxically, however, we discovered in making this, the third film of our series, that Wales also retained a reputation as a place where remoteness and solitude might be found. There were artists who came to Wales precisely because they sought remote places and what they hoped would be an accompanying simplicity of life. One of them was Brenda Chamberlain who made the hazardous crossing to Bardsey Island to settle and work there in 1947. Like Chamberlain, other artists sought refuge in the Welsh hills from urban life and produced work of the highest quality. Hopefully, our film illustrates a simple but important truth: the diversity and richness of art created in Wales, or about Wales, is the result of as complex a mix of personalities, techniques, geographies, ideas and influences as art created anywhere in the world. Perhaps we should be ready to celebrate that truth more often than we do. Episode three of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 10 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.
From Wales to London and back again
Standing on the southern flank of Craig y Llyn, trying to picture what Treherbert and the valley stretching away from me must have looked like in the late 1940s, I realised that our third film had to explain, among many other things, the umbilical connections between art produced in those days i...
The ghosts of Cardiff
Very spooky feeling. Wandering, alone, around the beautifully refurbished art galleries of the National Museum of Wales. In one of the huge rooms, our director, Steve Freer and the crew are setting up to film paintings by Ceri Richards and Graham Sutherland for the second programme in our series...
David Jones and the essence of Welshness
I may not be the greatest admirer of his work, but we couldn't leave the artist David Jones out of our second film. He was the kind of semi-detached Welshman, born in England, partly of Welsh parentage, who becomes a disciple of what he imagines to be the essence of Welshness. So, in his enthusiasm to do his bit in World War One, he joins a regiment that has a Welsh name but discovers that it contains as many Cockneys as it does Taffs. He survives the horrors of the trenches and returns to Britain, his knapsack full of wonderful drawings of his comrades from the Western Front. He is determined to make his living as an artist but does so in the oddest way: he heads for an abandoned monastery on the steep flanks of a tiny, remote hamlet, called Capel y Ffin, in the eastern Black Mountains of Wales. There, he joins an artistic community, led by the distinguished (and, it turns out, disturbingly odd) sculptor, Eric Gill, who had moved from gentler Sussex to the monastery with his religious cohorts and extended family. As David Jones expert Dr Anne Price Owen explained to us on a grey, freezing morning in Capel y Ffin, this was a turning point for Jones. The simple, Spartan existence he found at the monastery, steeped in religious mysticism and guided by Gill's quirky creativity, helped Jones break loose of the artistic conventions that had governed his approach to painting up to that point. Our cameraman, Tudor Evans, framed the monastery against the hillside - a panorama complete with what appeared to be the very same horses that Jones included in his drawings and paintings back in 1925. In reverential, hushed tones, Tudor, with one eye glued to the viewfinder, said, 'Superb. What absolute peace. It looks as if nothing's changed in 85 years...' A moment later, he leapt back and pointed, his finger quivering, outraged that his cameraman's nirvana had been shattered by the sudden, howling appearance of a quad bike, charging towards the horses, driven by a farmer intent on rounding-up his livestock and caring nothing for Tudor's artistic sensibilities. Our director, Steven Freer, the very essence of diplomacy, consoles Tudor. 'It's OK,' he says, in words as soothing as the British Ambassador might use in a nuclear missile bunker in Pyongyang, 'you've shot some wonderful stuff for us already. We've got more than enough...' Tudor doesn't look convinced but we pack up, the quad-bike's vile whine still echoing off both sides of the valley, and head west to the jewel that is the Glynn Vivian gallery in Swansea. I know I'm going to feel more at home there, in Dylan Thomas's ugly lovely town, full of glorious pictures, painted by the very same pals Dylan argued with over milky coffee at the Kardomah. Evan Walters, Ceri Richards, Alfred Janes, Vincent Evans and a host more of west Wales' best. What a treat! Episode two of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 3 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.
Climbing the peaks of 20th century Welsh art
A miracle: I'm to climb a cliff near Blaenau Ffestiniog and it isn't raining. Colin Thomas, the director of our first programme, keeps glancing across the brooding ridges of the Moelwyns. He chews his lip at the sight of dark, churning clouds gathering above Tremadog Bay. Two professional cli...
Framing Wales: art in the 20th century
How does a battered survivor of 40 years of stormy political wars start to tell the story of art created in Wales in the 20th century? Climbing alone in the Alps in 2010, I had plenty of time to think about it. It struck me that rugged, dramatic scenery was the obvious place to start. After al...
