MORNING SERIAL
THE entrance opened up further into a mock-up of shops, a coal-lit kitchen with Mam, her wire hair in a bun, larger than life and even deader than the flanking models of the mufflered collier and the leaping-into-his-arms child. I averted my sensitive eyes. The only thing that was welcoming was the Croeso sign and the silence that truly meant No Visitors. The assistant at the shop’s counter hadn’t looked up from the receipts she was checking from all the profits the Centre was making in glinting paraphernalia. Everything else appeared to be free.
I walked up the open metal staircase to the first floor. Tables, chairs, coffee, Welsh cakes. And, unexpected by me, a pitchroofed gallery space. More sentiment I guessed, and so only half-glanced at the walls.
There were five or six canvasses and a few drawings from each of the five painters on show. The work was certainly singular in each individual style but it hung together, more like a collective emotion than a group. I felt the need of the old man’s guidance for detail but its overall glow washed over me in any case at the fag end of a sodden afternoon, with only the unforgiving glare of the overhead panels of electric light to pick out colour that was insistent but mostly muted. There were no eyeball-teasing globs of colour erupting off board and canvas in great tears of flaking pigment. And though there were entrancing and painterly marriages of acid green and frothy underskirt pink and gritty ochre to quiz comic book blues and reds, this work, as a totality, was not about sensing delight, it was a structure. It was a scaffolding, one erected to climb towards an idea. The work was a counterclaim against what had been stolen, what had been hidden away, or mislaid, or forgotten, or neglected and abused. They had painted the structure of lives. How it felt. How it was. How it should have been understood. How it could be. How, whatever the contrary outcome, it still mattered.
It had been seen, then, transfigured into a vision that was as unmistakeably real as it had once been actual.
CONTINUES MONDAY