Remembering a cultural icon

Artist and cultural commentator Osi Rhys Osmond is remembered in a new book of his collected essays, writes Jenny White...

WHEN Osi Rhys Osmond died in 2015, he left a significant gap in Wales’ cultural life. Best known as a painter, he was also an eloquent, evocative and insightful writer who addressed a wide range of topics – with art and artists being a perennial theme.

Now, to mark what would have been his 80th birthday, a book of his collected essays has been released. Cultural Alzheimer’s And Other Essays was compiled by Ali Anwar, a philanthropic supporter of the arts in Wales and published by his not-for-profit organisation the H’mm Foundation, which aims to raise the profile of poetry and poets in people’s lives.

Inspired by the Bardd Teulu (household poet) tradition of medieval and renaissance Wales, the foundation encourages businesses and other organisations to engage with poetry in a number of ways, including the ‘adopt a poet’ scheme in which poets give readings in the workplace.

Cultural Alzheimer’s And Other Essays is a fitting sequel to the H’mm Foundation’s earlier publication, Encounters With Osi, which focused more on his visual art. The essays in the new collection have been drawn from multiple sources, sometimes manually transcribed from the original publication and in several occasions translated from the original Welsh so that both Welsh and English language versions can be included in the book.

Many of Osmond’s essays appeared in Planet, but wherever Osmond had work published, Anwar made it his mission to track the work down. The book also includes Western Mail articles about Osmond and a collection of tributes published after his death.

The essays themselves are erudite, intelligent and thought-provoking. Osmond writes with insight and authority on artists including Josef Herman, John Selway and Tim Davis, on exhibitions such as Sisley’s English and Welsh paintings at the National Museum in Cardiff and ventures into psychogeography, recording explorations of Wales and its landscape. He also delves into memory, as in the richly evocative childhood recollections of Boys Are Primitive Men.

“I was fascinated with the way he doesn’t like

FICTION

1. No Plan B Lee Child & Andrew Child

2. It Starts With Us

Colleen Hoover

3. The Satsuma Complex Bob Mortimer

4. A Heart Full Of Headstones Ian Rankin

5. The Bullet That Missed Richard Osman

6. The Seven Moons Of Maali Almeida

Shehan Karunatilaka

7. Babel RF Kuang

8. The Atlas Paradox

Olivie Blake

9. She And Her Cat

Makoto Shinkai & Naruki Nagakawa

10. The Boys From Biloxi John Grisham (compiled by Waterstones) full stops – his sentences are often paragraphs,” says Anwar. “I always thought that he was as good a writer as an artist, which is very unusual – to find somebody who could write well and was also a first-class painter.”

Anwar met Osmond through another renowned Welsh writer, Nigel Jenkins, at a poetry reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.

“Nigel introduced him to me,” he says. “He was fascinated with Arabic names because he had visited Jerusalem and Palestine and did a lot of paintings there – so he had a few Arabic words and wanted to speak to me in Arabic. That’s how our friendship started – he became a very close friend, a big supporter of the H’mm Foundation and I visited him several times in his house at Llansteffan.

“I really miss his wit and his company,” he adds. “He gave you the impression that he knew everything – he had great self-confidence.

“When I was making the first book, I met a lot of his former students and nobody had a bad thing to say about him. I’ve published about 16 of these books and in private people tell me things about the characters that I write about and I was really keen to hear some gossip and about him, but I just couldn’t collect anything.”

Osmond was, as Professor M Wynn Thomas writes in in his introduction to the new book, “a free spirit, [who] was consumed by a passion to set others free”.

Thomas adds that Osmond’s whole career as painter, writer and communicator involved a constant display of courage – “the courage to speak his mind forthrightly and eloquently, to challenge fearlessly and to confront boldly”.

Discussing Osmond’s politics, he adds: “A committed nationalist, he was an equally committed internationalist who never tired of exploring parallels between the condition of Wales and that of similarly challenged and threatened communities in every corner of the globe.

“His travels took him through the Middle East, down to Africa and onwards to Australia. He was proud of being ‘engaged’ as a painter, teacher and writer, but he was never blinkered or bigoted in any way.

“His range of sympathies could be startlingly unexpected and his generosity of spirit contributed to his unquestionable magnetism. Some might find him provocative, or exasperating, in his stance – he confessed to having been a bit of a ‘brawler’ in his youth – but we’ve never met anyone with the hardness of heart actually to dislike him.”

In this, the year when he would have celebrated his 80th birthday, Anwar hopes that his new publication will keep Osmond’s memory alive.

“I just hope that people will remember him and celebrate a his 80th birthday,” he says. “I hope that people who like his work and people who appreciate his work will want to celebrate his work and life and will find this new book interesting.”

Cultural Alzheimer’s And Other Essays is out now, published by the H’mm Foundation. More details at www.thehmmfoundation.co.uk