Elis Gwyn Jones
22. 2. 18. – 3. 9. 99.
a tribute by Emrys Parry

This is a tribute to a gifted artist, teacher and friend who started me on a journey of discovery and creativity and kept a watchful eye on my progress until his death over three years ago.
I attended Pwllheli Grammar School from 1952-58 and am counted among a number of pupils who were influenced by the teaching of Elis Gwyn Jones.
I was a member of the first group from the school to choose the visual arts as a career and one of the earlier generations of entrants from a Welsh speaking working class background to access the English Art School system. It is remarkable that so many of us should choose to become visual artists. Before we went to Pwllheli Grammar School we had no role models and no knowledge of a Welsh visual tradition.
I believe that Elis Gwyn Jones with his talent and insight was instrumental in awakening our interest. His reputation as a painter and his ability to connect with our own experience, inspired many, who would have expressed themselves through other subjects, to chose art and design.
Love of genealogy and place is deeply rooted in the Welsh psyche. As children we were part of a community defined and united by the Welsh language and many of my contemporaries belonged to families that had lived in this part of Wales for centuries. Some, including mine on the maternal side could trace their ancestry back to the ‘gogynfeirdd’ and were heirs to a literary tradition reaching back to the sixth century. My paternal grandfather, a granite setsman, spoke little English and died in 1977 aged 101.
The communities of Llyn in the early 50’s were, in this respect all the same. Families that had been settled in the peninsula for generations were custodians of memory and nurtured loyalty to ‘bro’.
The Grammar School in Pwllheli served a wide catchment area. Coaches would collect children from villages and isolated farms each morning and take them home in the late afternoon. We came from Nefyn, Morfa Nefyn, Pistyll, Llithfaen, Llanaelhaearn, Trefor, Llannor, Pentreuchaf, Fourcrosses, Chwilog, Efailnewydd, Rhydyclafdy, Penrhos and Llanbedrog to the market town of Pwllheli. Each form in the school had a mix of girls and boys from the different villages.
Gwyn, as his friends knew him, was the only art teacher and as such came into contact with every child. He knew all the villages intimately, and the names and history of the main families living there. This thorough knowledge of ‘bro’ and his ability to share his love for it was central to his teaching and to his influence on us as budding artists.
He used the Welsh language to make the world of art and design accessible and to connect it to our own experience. Word and image were indivisible and Gwyn’s great gift was to use the language to create images that would awaken and inspire the dullest of us. He observed in one of his teaching diaries that ‘the mightiest act of creativity, which touches us each day, is the Welsh language’ It was for him a medium for creativity. His great gift, as a teacher was the ability to share it.
Gwyn, a man of strong convictions with an individual and sometimes absurd view on life, was a hero to the small group of us who were drawn into his orbit. His explosive outbursts and opinions on a range of topics were eagerly anticipated. They were so vividly expressed and in a language so rich that they are fondly remembered and recalled word for word to this day. Gwyn graduated the Classics as well as Welsh and had no formal training in art and design. His accomplishments as a painter, writer, producer of plays, musician, translator, lecturer, critic, and scholar informed his teaching and we benefited.
He would suggest a topic for us to consider and then enlarge upon it using his gift for language to fire and stimulate the imagination, tossing ideas at us as he strode energetically about the room.
The latest Studio magazine was available for us to read and the Arts Council travelling exhibitions of original works displayed on the art room walls provided examples of the work of living artists. In this way we became familiar with the work of Ceri Richards, Kenneth Rowntree, John Petts, Brenda Chamberlain and many others.
We were encouraged to learn about contemporary issues and to visit exhibitions.
Gwynfor Roberts and I were urged to join a Christmas shopping trip to Liverpool so that we could visit the first John Moore’s exhibition to see prize-winning work by John Bratby, Jack Smith and Victor Pasmore.
Above all else, we were encouraged to use our home environment and local culture as a primary source for creativity. Gwyn delighted in seeing images from our immediate experience appearing in the work. Gwynfor Roberts used images from the family farm. John Baum painted the quarrymen of Trefor coming home from work. David Wyn Griffiths used the characters and the houses of Pwllheli to create Llarregub whilst I immersed myself in the landscape around Nefyn which I walked with my grandfather.
Gwyn hated the encroachment of concrete and plastic and the casual adoption of the fashionable. I remember vividly his display of horrors on the art room wall using photographs of petrol stations, lamp-standards and super-markets. They were all in his opinion, intrusive and a threat to vernacular integrity. He was above all a man of his ‘bro’. Gwyn never left his roots in Eifionydd.
I left home in 1958 to attend Leicester College of Art and Design where the approach to art education was very different and challenging. It was a cultural shock. I was a student at that time when the National Diploma Course in Art and Design with its traditional approach was being swept away by the Coldstream Report. It heralded the development of new and very different system of art education. I observed at first hand the interface between the old and the new and benefited from both.
The National Diploma in Design which I followed was rooted in the figurative tradition and demanded a degree of competence in craft and drawing skills. This encouraged me to draw and most of my holidays were spent drawing the landscape of the Llyn peninsula. This practice kept my connection with my roots in Wales alive and started a habit, which continues to this day.
Since graduating I have lived happily and taught in East Anglia but have never spiritually left Wales. Consequently my work as an artist has relied heavily on memory and on drawings and photographs made on regular visits to family and friends. These trips inevitably meant calling at Tyn Llan, Gwyn’s home in Llanystumdwy.
Over the years, Gwyn had become a good friend and he was there to support and encourage me at key points in my development as an artist. He organised my first exhibition in 1964 - a group show of the work of former pupils held at the Gegin gallery and theatre in Criccieth. I had been recently appointed to teach colour and drawing on the Foundation Course at Great Yarmouth. It was a sector of education that would be my career for the next thirty years and also keep me away from Wales. My work in that first exhibition was non-figurative influenced by American expressionism and the painting of Alan Davie. Gwyn was kind enough to buy a painting and to describe the work as being influenced by the Welsh poetic tradition.
During my visits to Tyn Llan Gwyn encouraged me to believe that although I lived in England I was an artist with the potential to make a contribution to art in Wales. His belief and support sustained my development over the years. He became a mentor, an invaluable source of advice and a perceptive interpreter of my work.
We would sit in the living room underneath a small window that pierced the thick stone walls letting in light from the garden. News would be exchanged and I would tell him about my work. Our conversation ranged far and wide but always returned to observations about the people and peculiarities of Llyn and Eifionydd. The origin of a saying or custom would be discussed and I would wonder about the history of some occurrence. Gwyn would agree or correct me gently if in my enthusiasm, I offered a fanciful or erroneous interpretation. He had a tremendous respect for knowledge and a greater respect for those who were receptive to knowledge. We were old friends and easy companions but he was still my teacher.
Gwyn had always argued a case for the Welsh dimension in art and design and made the observation when writing about my work, that it was like… ‘A poet writing in ‘cynghanedd ‘– in the strict metres of poetry expressed in colour and line. He understood that being an inheritor of a strong literary tradition it was natural for me to find visual equivalents to poetic structures and rhythms.
This insight into the relationship between the poetic mind that found expression in the ‘cynghanedd’ and its visual counterpart is of significance not only in understanding my work but also the work of others who can access the Welsh oral tradition directly through the medium of the Welsh language.
Exclusivity of language and the introspection of poetry reinforce cultural preoccupations. The Welsh language is the identity and memory of the indigenous culture of Wales. The journey of the mind that found expression through the strict metres of the ‘cynghanedd’ is the most notable feature of our bardic tradition.
Gwyn knew this when circumstances brought him into contact with a generation of receptive young pupils at Pwllheli Grammar School. His inspirational teaching made them realise the value of their heritage and the uniqueness of their environment. The fact that so many of them became successful in the world of art and design speaks volumes for his ability and his vision.
Elis Gwyn Jones died on 3 September 1999.
He will not be forgotten.
The land has a memory and when age upon age of its inhabitants lie quietly in the soil, the stones will speak.

by Emrys Parry