MORNING SERIAL
IN all this work there was not a trace of the identikit Valleys, stereotyped and drooled over and caricatured, in words and images.
Worth and purpose lost, hollowed out in memorials and monuments, reduced to the heroic they had rightly spurned. In these native hands these places and people had been disassembled, and put back together.
The last section of one wall of work held me longest. It seemed attuned to a future. The painting technique was looser in execution, enormous canvases filled with brushstrokes that owed their liquidity to the reckless arm more than the dab of a controlling hand.
The customary framework of a familiar landscape was intact. A look down from the mountain plateau back into the rash of buildings below. Homes slotted in clumps, and rearing public buildings on perpendicularly set street corners.
The legacy was there still to view, and to live in, albeit unusually caught, as if in sun traps. But it was the bodies that were so different. They did not stand or sit as if terminally defined.
They jumped and raced and swung each other around and somersaulted on trampolines in a riot of upside-down mobility.
Arms were muscle taut beneath short-sleeved shirts. Or legs, brown and liquescent, were set running free of flying skirts. The painter moved in and through his mobile subjectmatter, refusing the viewer the luxury of seeing anything as settled.
If the past was a place that made the present a prison for the mind then this blotchy capture of living was a release. In the light of the exhibition I sensed all my old man’s early courage more than his late resignation.
It was dark, a crepuscular enfolding light, when I finally left that gallery. I asked downstairs when Haf would be coming into work since there was no sign of her anywhere.
No one had even heard of her. But they were helpful. The senior manager was called. She was young, pert and smiled a lot.
I repeated my query.
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW