Rhys Davies is the
exhibiting artist in a rather unusual “residency” at Hope and Feathers Gallery
in Amherst, Massachusetts. Davies’ plan is to honor both his home country --
Wales -- and his new Western Massachusetts home. Throughout the month of June,
he will paint the likenesses of Dylan Thomas and Emily Dickinson onto papers
mounted on the gallery’s largest wall. That wall of new images will be in
constant view of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom windows, the room where she wrote
all her poetry, in her home across the street. No pressure.
The gallery will be
posting new photographs daily of the portraits-in-progress (at http://hopeandfeathersframing.com/rhys-davies). The photograph below shows the wall when we
visited with the artist (all photographs here are my own). From my photograph’s
angle, the Dylan Thomas portion (empty beer mug and Old Holborn box, so far) is
shown in the foreground, and the Emily Dickinson is off to the left. This
angled photograph will, I hope, display the artist’s lines and shadings, attached
papers and textures:
As of this morning, the
Emily Dickinson portion of the ongoing painting (posted online by the gallery)
shows the view from her bedroom window over the family fields (where the
gallery now stands). Davies works with papers on the gallery floor, roughing in
images with charcoal and paint, and then places each well-worked fragment of
the painting into its chosen spot on the wall. The artist and gallery have set
up the space so that Davies is working, as much as possible, within his own regular
studio surroundings, which include a teapot and cup, books from his studio,
sketches, and drawing and painting materials. There is a bench for visitors to
watch as Davies works each day. Here
is Rhys Davies in his gallery “studio”:
The portraits are progressing
in dark charcoal, browns, greys and blacks, growing from small details to a
larger-scale vision. Here is the finished portriat of Emily Dickinson:
This is serious life and art at the edge. Davies’ (completed) work on the same wall, called “Tryweryn,” [Dryweryn, in the Welsh language] is also created in this emblematic, nearly mythical approach. Davies has pictured the people of a small, agricultural, Welsh-speaking area, displaced by a distant governing body that legislated a dam:
This is serious life and art at the edge. Davies’ (completed) work on the same wall, called “Tryweryn,” [Dryweryn, in the Welsh language] is also created in this emblematic, nearly mythical approach. Davies has pictured the people of a small, agricultural, Welsh-speaking area, displaced by a distant governing body that legislated a dam:
The campaign to save the
Tryweryn Valley and the village of Capel Celyn
from being flooded to supply water to the city of Liverpool
began on 20
December 1955....The personal impact on the residents of
Capel Celyn was
enormous; many were forced to leave homes that had been in
their families for
generations. Their loss, and all that it represented,
has become iconic in Welsh
politics and in the struggle over the Welsh language. ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’
[Remember Tryweryn] remains one of the most powerful slogans
in the Welsh
language and is seen as a rallying call of Welsh nationalism.
from http://www.peoplescollection.wales/content/tryweryn
Not all the houses were
completely destroyed before the construction began and, when the water levels
decrease, some become visible once again. Ghosts. Here is Davies’ “Tryweryn”:
Davies first tackled
this theme in art school in London, where the distance between Parliament and
Wales must have seemed all too real. He says he felt hiraeth, a really deep longing, for home. The paintings then were
blue, “large blue graveyard paintings,” he says. Years later, he has returned
to the depths of Welsh identity in “Tryweryn,” but, I suspect, with rather more
ferocity. Davies has portrayed these people with recognizable features, but these
are not exacting portraits: the features are deepened, exaggerated. The heads
are like carved stone, with strong expressions; they are both sad and
frightening. They are painted at just a bit more than human scale, and yet they
are so much larger than we are. Because of the way they are drawn, and the reason
that they were drawn, this man and woman stand for a great deal more than
themselves. A simple “lifelike” commissioned portrait might only have meaning to
those who know the subject. But Davies’ emblematic drawings transform these
faces through their particular context. These people stand for the
village of Capel Celyn and its valley, gone forever.
seems cut of the same
Welsh stone.
This is one style of
work by Rhys Davies. But across the room, there is an abrupt shift:
These paintings offer a changed
subject, color, and medium; and there’s a foreground-background shift, just for
starters. Here is “Mwyar Duon I,” which refers to realism without being,
exactly, realistic:
The second large
painting (the two bookend some smaller studies) “Mwyar Duon II” enters into a
deeper color palette of greens and deep blues, with deeper shadows and many
crossings-over of insistent lines.
I asked Davies what
accounts for the variation in subject, from “Tryweryn” to these thick
explorations of natural growth? He seemed surprised by the question. “It’s all
one, for me,” he said, “ the same.”
How is it the same? How
does an artist go from one set of topics to a very distinct other, sharing only
a time frame and a formal technique?
We can say it might be
the artist’s common source, that the story of the flooded village told in
blacks and browns is, of course, related not only to the Welsh people there but
to its farms with their colorful crops; the dirt and plants, flooded in shadows
or surviving in pinks and bright pinks, blues and greens, all part of Davies’
growing up with a consciousness formed by Carmarthen (Caerfyrddin). Two
subjects, presented through the eyes of one consciousness.
Or it could be an
interesting “other.” A woman who
was visiting at the opening said to me, in an offhand way, “these seem Rousseau-ian.” “Yes,” I said, “they are.” And then I forgot about it until this
morning.
And I looked through all
my art books and throughout the web, because Henri Rousseau was not one of “my”
artist people. I do believe now
that my oversight was a big mistake. Rousseau wanted to be William-Adolphe
Bourgereau, a traditional painter of nudes accepted and lauded by the French
Academie. But he wasn’t; he was much more. Picasso praised him during
Rousseau’s lifetime, then disowned him later (as he would anxiously disown all
of his important influences). Take a look at Rousseau’s first “jungle”
painting, from 1891, “Tiger in a Tropical Storm: Surprised!”:
There was a show of
Rousseau works, “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris,” at the National Gallery of
Art in 2005, and it travelled to the Tate Modern in 2006. It was a revelation
to the critics, many of whom, like me, never thought much of Rousseau’s influential
art-historical place. Here is a perceptive critic on the Rousseau he saw at the
Tate:
[these were] pictures created on the scale of salon
historical paintings, yet in a style calculated to resemble children’s
illustration run amok.... There was a method, and an ambition, behind his assumed
naivety .... [the paintings] are self-evidently too artful, too carefully
conceived, to have been the products of mere unformed impulse .... No-one,
before Rousseau, had made painting look so much like dreaming.
Andrew
Graham-Dixon, “Henri Rousseau, Jungles in Paris”
06
Nov 2005, www.telegraph.co.uk
And suddenly I saw it. I
saw the connection. Both Rousseau and Davies paint “on the scale of salon
historical paintings,” but they both play extravagantly with subject matter.
Rousseau painted jungles he never saw (he never left France, and visited
botanical gardens and relied on postcards and the zoo for his inspiration).
Davies begins to paint where Rousseau left off, dreams of jungle tangles he has
never seen, exactly, either, and monumental faces that represent, but do not
precisely resemble, the troubled farmers of his corner of Wales.
It’s the imagination,
stupid.
