It was in the Black Mountains that I made some drawings which it so happens, appear, in retrospect, to have marked a new beginning. I began at this time to see the direction I wanted to go - or at least to see it more clearly. My subsequent work can, I think, be truthfully said to hinge on that period. All my exhibited work dates from after that period, none, or virtually none, from before it.
.....it was at this propitious time that circumstances occasioned my living in nant Honddu, there to feel the impact of the strong hill-rhythms and the bright counter-rhythms of the afonydd dyfroedd which makes much of Wales such a 'plurabelle' - and there was also the rhythm of the ninth wave breaking on the morlan of Penfro.'
Very nearly a month ago, on our return journey to the Infernal City we stopped off in Brecon and 'Y Gaer' the rather architecturally vapid new 'cultural hub' (I posted about it here.) to see the current exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints and calligraphy by the twentieth century visionary artist/poet David Jones (1895-1974). Happily while the new building is sub-parr, the exhibition is most certainly not. It really is excellent, as is the catalogue written by Dr Peter Wakelin.
I first came across the work of David Jones as a teenager on what was must have been my first visit to Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, the exquisite former home of a friend of Jones, the curator Jim Ede. Here is my post about that extraordinary interior. If memory serves me well there are four works by Jones on display - all I think from later in his life.* This excellent exhibition, however, focuses on the two short years when Jones lived intermittently at Capel-y-ffin in the Honddu valley deep in the Black Mountains close to the English Border. An isolated place far removed from the world, that had attracted artists such as Turner & John Sell Cotman in the nineteenth century and Ravilious & Piper in the twentieth. Jones called it 'an enchanted place'.
Jones moved to Capel-y-ffin in 1924 when he was 29 years of age and engaged to Petra, the daughter of the artist/craftsman Eric Gill. Jones was then a postulant in the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic which Gill, along with Hilary Peplar had set up in 1920 for Catholic craftsmen, at Ditchling just below the South Downs, in Sussex. As a guild member Jones was also a third order, or Tertiary, Dominican, though apparently not through enthusiasm but because it was simply what one did there.
A lot of words have been spilt about Gill since the publication of Fiona McCarthy's biography of the craftsman/artist in 1989.** I don't want to add too many more, but I will quote something the science fiction writer Frank Herbert said about charismatic leadership: 'I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead: 'May be dangerous to your health.' Well, Gill, for all his talents, certainly turned out to be dangerous to the health. It is certainly tempting to view Gill, who lived a life of extreme contradiction, like a Late Sixties guru figure, surrounded by a small coterie of admirers and their families.
In a strange act of synchronicity Gill established his new community at Capel-f-ffin in the collection of buildings left by a failed Anglican religious community established by the so-called Fr Ignatius, a charismatic leader not unlike Gill. Both men were governed by their vanity, their ego. Both men had troubled relationships with their sexuality. And their attempts at community living eventually failed.***
Walter David Jones was born in London of an Welsh father and English mother, and he was to remain an essentially, and paradoxically, urban artist. His early life was lived on the suburban fringes of the capital, and it was there he began to identify not with the surrounding culture with its increasing disenchantment, but with that of his father and in particular with the British Heroic Age - the world of the Mabinogion and Arthur; of Y Gododdin and Aneurin; of Taliesin and the Hen Ogledd. He ditched his first name as too English, in favour of his second. All, I would suggest, examples of Jones's growing estrangement from urban Modernity, and his mother's culture and, perhaps, even his mother. In researching this piece I got side-tracked by the story of another charismatic anglo-catholic monastic, Aelred Carlyle, abbot of the anglican monastery he established on the island of Caldey off the coast of Pembrokeshire; in particular I was struck by a comment made by the novelist Dame Rose Macaulay in her Forward to Peter Anson's biography of Carlyle. She said of Carlyle that 'He seemed to live from boyhood in a romantic dream.' Well, I wouldn't go that far in my description of Jones, but there is an element of truth. I think he came to live in a world of the imagination, in the 'imaginal realm' perhaps.
At the age of 14 he started his formal art education at Camberwell School of Art. In 1915, at the age of 20 and in the second year of the Great War, and after at least one previous attempt to enlist, Jones enrolled in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He never quite recovered from his experience of the Western Front; his adult life being repeatedly disrupted by prolonged periods of mental ill health. The War, I suspect, exacerbating pre-existent issues.
Upon his return to civilian life at the end of the War Jones returned to his education. In 1921 he converted to Roman Catholicism and the catholic faith would remain crucial to Jones and increasingly at the heart of his work. It was at the suggestion of the priest preparing him for Baptism that Jones came into contact with Eric Gill and the community he and others had created at Ditchling. He was not the only man damaged by his experience of war to find solace in the life of the community.
In 1924 the life of the Guild was seriously disrupted by Gill's decision to leave for Capel. The situation became rancorous and resulted in Gill leaving the Guild as well as Ditchling. Gill's departure left a residue of bitterness among those who remained in Sussex and continued with the Guild. A bitterness that lingered for decades. Yet for all the disruption, the unhappiness it caused for some, the move to Capel formed for Jones some sort of integration, or axial alignment; like his conversion to Roman Catholicism a homecoming of sorts. He had essentially entered into his own mythos. After the horrors of war he had become re-enchanted. The effect on his art was immediate; a new style sprang, like Minerva from the head of Jovis, fully formed.
His reaction to this new environment is illustrated in fifteen landscape paintings - mixed media, mainly watercolour and ink - from this important period in Jones's career, and which form the core of the exhibition. A clear line of development is readily apparent as the style becomes increasingly dense and complex. The influence of Gill and Paul Nash is readily apparent.
A continual presence in these paintings was Twmpa, the mountain at the confluence of the Nant Bwch with the River Honddu, a breast of consolation, that reminds me of the presence of Mont St Victoire in the late works of Cezanne.
In some paintings, most obviously in 'Melting Snow' of 1925 where a hillside looks like a woman's breast and belly, Jones anthropomorphises the landscape.
The opposite applies to at least one of the three large portraits at the exhibition, that of Gill's daughter Petra, 'Petra in Rosenhag', dated 1931 with her slyly erotic expression, in which the folds of her dress are metamorphosed into a landscape. A painting, I have to say, that is an altogether different league from the other portraits that surrounds it. Evidence, one feels, for a continued emotional link between sitter and artist long after the end of their engagement.
There is, I believe, the outline of Twmpa between the sitter's breasts - one might say over her heart. Peter Wakelin is surely right to describe this image as archetypal. It is iconic - in the original and correct meaning on the word; for Jones here presents Petra as the Jungian archetype of the Great Mother, here as the guardian of the 'Vegetation Mysteries', her right hand nestling sensually in the deep, cave-like folds of her dress.**** And yet for all the great sensuousness of this painting there lies threat also; the flowers are benign enough but the wisps of Petra's hair, like dry, winter twigs, suggest a wilder nature.
Space is also given to the applied art he made at Capel such as his woodblock prints, and examples of his late work, both paining and calligraphic. The result forms an excellent introduction to Jones's life and work for those who come to him fresh.
Those years at Capel-y-ffin were longest period Jones was to spend in the Principality. With the collapse of his relationship with Petra Gill he returned to his parents in London and apart from the odd short visit, he was to remain in the capital for the rest of his life. Wales became, as Shropshire did for A E Housman, a 'land of lost content'. In a sense it was a life lived in exile
In 2015 The Guardian ran an article suggesting that we were in for a revival in interest in David Jones. Well, sadly, it hasn't happened. For all the recognition he received from the likes of T S Elliot and Kenneth Clarke, I suspect it never will; at least not in our current cultural climate which is among so many other things, deeply secular. I think this is reflected, sadly, in the lack of media attention this excellent exhibition received. Jones and his work is, now, simply, beyond our comprehension.
In the later works, for example, there is a deeply personal and complex symbolism that perhaps defies categorising. It is also the work of somebody with 'issues', rather like the work of the nineteenth century English artist Richard Dadd whose late work shares certain characteristics with late Jones. I place him, not only in the broad sweep of Romanticism and Neo-Romanticism, but more specifically in a continuum with Blake and his followers such a Samuel Palmer, though Jones's work evokes none of disquiet, or unease found the work of Blake. One feels that all four of these artists had somehow been in contact with the 'unseen' - whether that is internal or exterior to themselves, I don't know, and for the majority of people that is, perhaps, something disturbing.
Jones will always to a lesser or greater extent remain an outsider.
* I remember three images in particular: the painting 'Flora in Calix Light, 1950; and the calligraphy: 'Quia incarnatus est' of 1953, 'Tailpiece for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner' of 1928
** Fiona MacCarthy, 'Eric Gill', Faber and Faber, London, 1989
*** The relationship between both Gill and 'Fr Ignatius' and Dom Aelred Carlyle is fascinating, but beyond the scope of this post. But essentially all three were to some point fantasists driven by their egos, which if they were to achieve what wanted they should have endeavoured to brake. Gill, for instance, was once described as 'A fine draughtsman, a vain poseur, a tiresome writer....he behaved like a vain willful child.'
**** See Erich Neumann's 'The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype', 1963
