Alfred Janes - maker of pictures

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Disgrifiodd Alfred Janes ei hun yn gofiadwy nid fel arlunydd ond fel "gwneuthurwr lluniau". Dros yrfa hir, gweithiodd yr artist mewn amrywiaeth o arddulliau a chyda deunyddiau traddodiadol a modern, yn amrywio o baent olew a phastel i bapur a phersbecs.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Alfred Janes memorably described himself not as a painter but as "a maker of pictures". Over a long career the artist worked in a range of styles and with traditional and modern materials, ranging from oil paint and pastel to paper and perspex. His remarkable body of work, created over sixty years, is revealed here by over seventy works, many previously unpublished, including ten signature images.

Archebu o flaen llaw

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Ceri Thomas is a free-lance art historian, curator and artist. He has published books and exhibition catalogues on the artists Joan Baker, David Bell, Ogwyn Davies, Alan Salisbury and Ernest Zobole, and he was curator of art at the University of South Wales until 2017. He has curated exhibitions for the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, National Assembly for Wales, National Library of Wales (which holds examples of his art), National Waterfront Museum, Newport Museum and Art Gallery and the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art (of which he was President from 2024-2026). He exhibits in Wales and abroad.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Born in Swansea in 1911, Janes was being described as a “brilliant young painter” just one year after he entered Swansea School of Art at sixteen. He developed an early interest in portraiture and still-life, and these two genres informed much of his subsequent career. In the 1930s, he was a member of the now legendary ‘Kardomah Gang’ which included his close friends and contemporaries the poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, and the composer Daniel Jones. In 1934, Dylan Thomas shared digs with Janes in London, where the artist was studying at the Royal Academy Schools. But Janes had discovered modernism, exhibiting in London alongside artists including Picasso, Miro, and Matisse, and he left the Academy. War interrupted this highly promising career, a period recorded in hitherto unpublished letters to his wife, Mary, and he returned to Swansea. However, from 1963 until his death in 1999 he was based in London again, teaching part-time at Croydon School of Art, where his colleagues included Bridget Riley. He began using new materials including glass, perspex, marbles, and PVA paints, producing an array of modernist reliefs. He also resumed portraiture, experimented with collage, and, ever restless, began a new form of still-life painting that hovered between representation and pure abstraction. It is only now that the full scope of his considerable originality and achievement is being revealed.