Peter Wakelin Bücher

Roger Cecil (1942-2015) has been described as one of the great abstract artists of his generation, yet in his lifetime he was hardly known outside a circle of fellow painters. He was content to paint for himself, protecting his privacy and exhibiting rarely. If he did show his work, collectors rushed to acquire it. Among curators, he was a legendary figure. When his body was found after a police search in 2015, his death made headlines. At art college in the early 1960s he was a star of his generation, but he walked out on a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and returned to practise on his own in the South Wales mining village and terraced house where he grew up. He devoted himself to painting, living simply and working as a casual labourer, opencast miner and art tutor while producing work of extraordinary beauty and sophistication. After his parents' deaths the whole house became his studio. This book presents for the first time the extraordinary power and beauty of his work across his whole career. Comparisons can be drawn with great twentieth-century abstract artists, Dubuffet, de Staël and Tàpies, but Roger Cecil sought to be - and was - remarkably uninfluenced. The reputation of his mesmerising art can only grow as his legacy is revealed --

For six decades Charles Burton has been one of the major figures of art in Wales. Born in 1929, he grew up amid the poverty of the pre-war Rhondda. Even as a student he was a central figure in the influential Rhondda Group, his work was purchased for public collections and he won the Gold Medal of the National Eisteddfod. Carel Weight described him as "one of the most lively" of a Royal College generation that included Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, Fred Cuming and Leon Kossof. He was a charismatic head of painting at Liverpool College of Art when it was a hub of pop culture in the 1960s. Since returning to Wales in 1970 he has continued to produce works of brilliant serenity.0This book presents for the first time the full breadth of Charles Burton's career, from the vigour of his earliest Valleys landscapes through paintings made in Egypt during National Service to his cool abstracts and expressive heads of the 1960s and the elegant perfection of his still lifes, interiors and landscapes of the last four decades.

Innumerable artists have found refuge in Britain during the past hundred and fifty years, escaping dispossession, torture, intellectual oppression or war. Their arrival frequently enriched art in Britain.00Following the isolation of most émigrés in the First World War, artists who escaped Nazism in the 1930s became part of art communities in places as far apart as Hampstead, Glasgow, Merthyr Tydfil, the Swansea valley and St Ives. Gabo and Mondrian influenced Nicholson, Hepworth and Lanyon, while younger artists were inspired by radical ideas of Kurt Schwitters and John Heartfield and by the Expressionists Bloch, Herman, Kokoshcka and Koppel. Lotte Reiniger brought innovations in animation and Bill Brandt and Felix Man showed the potential of documentary photography. Refugees have come since from China, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.00The experiences of artist refugees have followed many patterns. Some stayed a short time and moved on, some made their lives in Britain, teaching, exhibiting and inspiring. In the 1940s, refugees contributed to the war effort and the defeat of fascism. The stories of later refugees' contributions to British art are still unfolding.00Exhibition: Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK (14.12.2019 - 01.03.2020) / MOMA Machynlleth, UK (14.03.- 16.06.2020).

Sally Moore paints worlds where fiction is truer than fact, where outer absurdity stands in for inner reality. Like an actor, she uses her observations of people and situations to explore ideas with herself as the performer. Through surreal metaphors--tigers in the sitting room, monkeys on her dining table, small boats taking her to sea--she battles moods, fears and social expectations. She continues a figurative tradition that extends from Caravaggio to Balthus, though her active, clothed women rebut traditional depictions. Sally Moore's childhood in South Wales was creative, her mother a dancer and her father a painter, the house filled with artist friends, though it was shattered by her father's death when she was just thirteen. After Oxford University and Birmingham College of Art she developed her painting with awards from the Delfina Studios and the British School in Rome, becoming one of the distinctive figure painters of her generation. This book is an opportunity to see her work across four decades. As the novelist William Boyd has pointed out, to view her paintings together is to reveal a lifelong project to explore mood, memory and states of mind.

No artist has been more committed to recording and interpreting such environments than George Little. Born in the east end of Swansea in 1927 he grew up next to the abandoned copper works, slag heaps and still-busy docks of Dylan Thomas's 'ugly, lovely town'.