Pick of the week

For many people who were not preoccupied with partying, the lockdown months proved to be a remarkably creative time. Long-unwritten books were achieved, music composed, gardens redesigned and languages learned. A couple of weeks ago, I went to a screening of one such lockdown project, Under Milk Wood in Paint, a film in celebration of Dylan Thomas by the artist Alex Williams.

In his Isle of Wight studio, Mr Williams made hundreds of small paintings to illustrate Thomas’s 24 hours in the waking and sleeping minds of the residents of Llareggub. He edited them over the BBC’S 1954 Richard Burton recording and gently cut it down to run at 59 minutes. The result is both impressive and inspirational.

It is a joyful marriage of words and images and a demonstration of the sheer pleasure of painting that deserves the widest possible audience. To begin with, it will soon be found in the Bridgeman Images archive and available on DVD and online.

Mr Williams’s latest exhibition, ‘Feasible Colours’, has opened at the Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-wold, Gloucestershire, where it runs to April 27. His wryly composed farmyard subjects are there, but so, too, are witty tributes to favourite artists who have influenced him—rembrandt, Juan de Pareja and Velázquez, Stubbs, Goya, Picasso—and imagined, never-to-be realised films, such as Lust for Life 2, as ‘produced’ in Dubai with Morgan Freeman as van Gogh. There is also a splendid confection of van Gogh and Gauguin at work on some sunflowers, as the life of modern Arles goes on beyond the Yellow House (above).