An exciting collection of work by three artists spanning North, Mid and South Wales will have art aficionados battering down the door at Ffin y Parc Gallery. The New Artists exhibition, which is launched at the Llanrwst based Art Gallery and Country House on Sunday, April 27 and runs until Wednesday, May 21, features three extraordinary artists, all new to the Gallery.

John Wynne Morris was born in Waunfawr, and studied at Wrexham, Stoke and Liverpool. He has been working as an artist and designer for over 30 years, creating paintings and ceramic sculptures and now resides in Glan Conwy.

For his first show at Ffin y Parc, he has immersed himself in the local landscapes that he has known and loved since childhood. “As well as the mountains and the mercurial effects of weather, he is fascinated by history’s marks and industry’s scars,” explained Gallery owner Ralph Sanders.

“His intensely emotional responses to his surroundings are also nostalgic and contemplative. The sense of passion tempered by tenderness and the artist’s eye striving for balance and harmony give the work its grace and elegance.”

Though Dutch by birth, Jacqueline Alkema has been living and working in Cardiff since 1979. She has made a collection of portraits exploring sexuality and domesticity, often using old Dutch proverbs as a starting point.

Ralph commented: “Her familiarity with Flemish paintings is clear in much of this work. The work is often dark and intimate. Whether the figures are staring straight at you, or lost in their own dance, they are demanding a one-on-one relationship with you. They want to communicate across the gap that keeps us all isolated, unknown. This work has a fierce simplicity, and its passion and fury is rendered with maximum control and precision. Here, the cold burns, the light freezes and the silence is deafening.”

Lyndon Thomas was born in Llanelli in 1941. He first exhibited paintings in the early 1960’s before becoming a potter and wood-turner and returned to painting in 2008.

His subject is predominantly the landscape of Wales’s Western extremities – Pembrokeshire and the Lleyn peninsula. Empty landscapes full of open skies, and perhaps an isolated farmhouse or shack. “These buildings often look as if they have been caught by surprise, added Ralph.

“They are tentative, temporary and apologetic! Whether bathed in sunlight, slipping into dusk or rain-soaked, Lyndon shows us a landscape that is secretive, ambivalent even, and adept at resisting the incursions of men.”

Ffin y Parc Gallery
Betws Road, Llanrwst
Conwy LL26 0PT United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)14 92642070
ralph@welshart.net
www.welshart.net

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday from 10am to 5pm
Sunday from 11am to 5pm