Ken Elias / Philip Gross
Remaining deeply rooted in the visual arts / culture of south Wales and the Valleys in particular.” Ken Elias’s art has always been responsive to and indicative of, the wider world. It’s richness is enhanced by his early experience of cinema which, with his love of art and poetry and his employment of memory and imagination, inform his striking images”
Dr Ceri Thomas
The Poet, Philip Gross recently dedicated the Poem ‘Surfacing for Ken Elias’ during a reading at Elias’s recent exhibition at The Redhouse Gallery, Merthyr Tydfil.
Let’s put in a word
for surfaces. The picture plane.
(Who muttered ‘superficial’? Surface
is what holds us. Where we meet. What we are)
For a lick and a promise
of paint, plaster skim on smoke-
charred brick. A word for the plasterer’s grace
a dance in two dimensions, watercolour flow. Wallpaper
too the,the kind we know
who grew up lovingly entombed
in pastel roses so gaily unreal that, from
here, can’t you almost smell them – more
so with age? For the settling
hush in the picture-house dark
the gnat-dance of dust motes up into the light
f the widening beam, that takes flight with a whirr,
cockchafer wings. For screens
where the light stops, spreads itself
into a world: an outside inside And a word
for the drumskin membrane of the moment just before
the main feature , lives
beyond, suspected, stirrings just behind
the wall. A word, which is itself a surface. Then
quiet. Tap gently. Hold your breath, putting an ear,
a wine glass, to the thin
partition. Muffled laughter. Whispers,
maybe our own. A creak, don’t wake the children,
of a board. A stairwell, years deep A foot on the stair.
Philip Gross
John Selway (1938 – 2017) / Julian Meek
“Sometime ago I wrote. Art is the coming together of the imaginary and
the factual “Fantasy & Fact”, Reality & Fiction. This still holds.
I think throughout my artistic life this has been my guiding mantra.
Occasionally the consequence has been through someone elses input –
the poems of Julian Meek on Christ’s Passion, a paraphrase.
The Passion series of work for St Michaels Church, Abertillery Gwent’
Gesthemane
Even today
the sense of paranoia
the self hunting the self
Even today
the thought of the burning cross
causes us
to raise our eyes
seeking the helicopter
the informer on the horizon
There no differences
all that has altered
is the nature of the garden.
we yearn for yet still to destroy,
Julian Meek
Robert Alwyn Hughes / Frank Olding 2010
‘Resurrection’ Exhibited, National Eisteddfod of Wales, Ebbw Vale
2010 poem Frank Olding
Atgofodiad (i waith Robert Alwyn Hughes)
Yn swn sen hagr a rhagrith – treng0dd
Ond try’i’ing yn fendith
At y gweunydd a’r gwenith
pan ddaw yn y glaw a’r gwith
In the sound of ugly rebuke and hypocrisy – he perished
But the agony becomes a blessing
On the fields of wheat
When it comes with the rain and the dew
