Steve Hopkin-Jones, photos

A quotation from IMAGING WALES (p.8): "Historically, even the majority of those in the visual arts professions in Wales, including artists, did not view conventional success as being possible within the country itself but needed to be sought elsewhere. Elsewhere, as it was for other artists in other parts of the United Kingdom, meant London, or even further afield. And they were all, until fairly recently, quite right. The situation in Wales was exacerbated, at least in part, by the lack of exhibiting and other institutions of artist support, but there was an extent to which this was the result of a mindset peculiar to Wales, one which implied that it was not possible - appropriate even - to develop distinctive Welsh institutions and structures and what attempts there had been were desultory, conservative and in fee to English models. This immediately distinguishes it from Scotland and Ireland. Although the former has at least twice the population and despite there having been a southern exodus, and an Anglicised 'ascendancy', the home infrastructure and market have been traditionally strong. Ireland, as the same size as Wales is a better comparator. It has emancipated itself from a colonial past not dissimilar to that of Wales and succeeded in developing a plethora of viable modern art institutions, both commercial and subsidised."

A quotation from The Visual Culture of Wales - INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY (p.266): "...the very notion of art related to a particular cultural experience became highly fashionable, and was often derided by the widespread use of the word 'provincialism'. A new cultural imperialism, masquerading as internationalism, overwhelmed the minds of all but a small minority of stobborn individualists in Wales, as in many other parts of Europe. The metropolitan effect, dominated by London and New York, was magnified to an unprecedented extent in Wales by structural changes in the way visual art was manufactured and presented. From the middle of the 1960s a huge expansion of public funding, operating through a matrix of art colleges, the Arts Council, and local authority exhibition spaces, rapidly increased both the amount of art being made and its exposure to the public. The turmoil caused by this combination of structural and aesthetic change in the art world persisted for over twenty years, and coincided with the collaps of industrial Wales in the form which had evolved over the previous two centuries."

A quotation from Imaging the Imagination (p.11): "There seems, in both Welsh and English writing of Wales, to have been an intensified (and reciprocated) interest in recent years in initiating and maintaining a dialogue with art and artists. This may be a tribute to the electric liveliness of the current art scene in Wales; or it may be an example of literature repositioning itself in the supposedly visual and post-linguistic culture of the postmodern present. Whatever the reason, it has resulted in important achievements by poets such as Tony Curtis, the range of whose work includes interviews with painters, collaborations..., and poems and sequences focusing on photographs and paintings. An answering impulse is felt in the work of artists like Ivor Davies and Iwan Bala."

An interesting comment by Herbert Read in his book Contemporary British Art(Harmondsworth/ Penguin 1951) says:"...the history of art shows that the art of any particular region always tends to revert to a regional norm - to a mode of sensibility and style of expression determined, we must assume, by ethnic and geographic factors...if art's vitality comes from the cross-breeding of styles, its strength comes from stability, from the roots that grow deep in a native soil."