Karel Lek
MBE, RCA is one of Wales’ most respected artists. He was born in Antwerp in 1929 but while still a boy moved with his parents as a war refugee to North Wales. He studied at Liverpool College of Art. He has exhibited regularly across Wales, and also shown in London, Amsterdam and Chicago. In July 2005, the National Library of Wales purchased six paintings and two sketchbooks for the national collection.
“Karel paints and draws people, modest people in modest situations, recorded with a wry humour that is never malicious,” observed the late Donald McIntyre RCA.
Karel Lek paints what he loves: people and the landscapes that people touch. He believes that “the ‘divine’ is in the ordinary” which he reveals through the quiet scenes that make up a life: a kitchen table, an elderly couple on a walk on the promenade, a café conversation.
He paints with compassion and empathy for his fellow men and women working until he has captured the essence. “A slight movement of a shoulder can say more than a thousand words.”
George Little
Born in 1927 in Swansea where he still lives. He has been exhibiting since 1951 and has work in many private and public collections in the UK and abroad. He has received a number of awards and prizes including a Special Prize awarded by John Piper in the Mid Wales Open Art Exhibition in Aberystwyth in 1983, First Prize in the National Coal Industry Art Exhibition in Blackpool in 1989 and an Arts Council Travel Grant in 1999.
His early visual experiences in Danygraig, an industrial area of Swansea where he grew up, have remained a life-long fascination and stimulation for his paintings. Little finds and reveals beauty in the “colour, texture and shape brought about by the decay of the copper, coal, steel and shipping industries, where they flourished and where they declined.”
Little lived through the Blitz and the colours and devastation of the war-time landscapes have left a lasting, powerful impression expressed in a number of paintings featured in this exhibition.
Gareth Thomas
Born in Swansea. In 1979 he committed to painting full time and established a reputation for his atmospheric paintings of the South Wales coastline and particularly the Gower peninsula. He has held numerous solo shows and his work is widely collected.
In this exhibition, paintings from south-east France feature alongside landscapes of south Wales and his focus, like many landscape artists, is on the effect of light on colour, whether it is “the more sombre atmospherics of Wales or the pure Provencal sky that lights up the beautiful land.”
The medium Thomas uses may vary – he may use pastel, acrylic or oil for a painting but each approach is chosen to best express his response and interpretation of colour and light for which he is highly regarded. This affinity for landscapes owes itself to his passion for working outdoors where he reacts to the land around him in “as direct a way as possible”.
The gallery is open Tues – Fri 10 – 5, Sat 10 – 4.30. There is no admission fee.
