Tony Goble

Tony Goble was a constant presence in the art community of Wales for more than thirty years. His sudden and premature death on 13 April 2007, at the age of 63, shocked his fellow artists and his innumerable former students, and robbed Wales of one of its most distinctive creative voices.

The work that he has left behind him is utterly individual, yet it was part of an artistic family that runs from European folk painting through Blake, Chagall and Dubuffet to a flowering in Cecil Collins, Ken Kiff and Eileen Cooper among others. His subjects were his own life and everyday surroundings, transformed by free association into other-worldly narratives: he was essentially a Magical Realist. He plucked imagery from all corners, capturing beasts, boats, medieval sculptures and Coptic icons to introduce to his own pictorial personification. He wrote, ‘My sketch pad is a “shopping basket”, a note-book and a net that catches and holds a collection of images, drawings, comments, observations, thoughts. A fish with a bird or a bird with a fish, a page of green water, a man in a bath wearing a bowler hat...’. A personalised religious imagery was often prominent: crosses, angel-muses and stairs linking mankind with God. He said, ‘I see my paintings as poems, as prayers if you like.’

His vitality of form and vividness of colour were seductive and his imaginary worlds persuasive, but they left space for others to exercise their imaginations. As he said, ‘When a painting is finished it has only just begun in another sense, as it starts a new creative process in the eye, mind and response of the viewer; the history of art is made through this second phase.’ He was admired especially by poets, who could re-weave his scenarios as new narratives: Sheenagh Pugh, Paul Henry and Malcolm Parr were among those who responded in writing.

The lines of division between his paintings and persona were blurred almost to invisibility. While his paintings were all drawn from his life, his life too was an artistic creation. He became an archetype, with a bird’s-nest beard, large hats, a bicycle, sandals and long hair. The bohemian look could be off-putting until he appraised your reaction by peering over the top of his glasses and you saw the mischievous twinkle in his eyes. Frequently, he made the mundane extraordinary, as when he acquired a new garden shed. He invited friends to celebrate, commissioning a composer and a poetry reading, calling in a priest to give a blessing, and proposing to found the Support the Shed Party. The playwright Twm Miall wrote, ‘Tony lives an eventful life, indeed one could say that he’s led several lives compared to the majority of people. Each day spent in his company is memorable for one reason or another. He attracts outsiders and fellow travellers like bees to the jam-pot and if you’re lucky enough to befriend the man then you’re guaranteed that your life will be immeasurably richer from then on.’

Anthony Barton Goble was born on 20 October 1943 at Newtown, or Drenewydd, as he preferred it. His father had lived a life of leisure with a private income from the family’s cotton mills in Manchester – he owned ‘several Lagondas’ – but he died of lung cancer before Tony was a year old. His mother took his two older sisters away to set up home in Rhos-on-Sea, near Llandudno, and left the baby with the district nurse who had seen him into the world, Mary Jones, and her husband Elfyn. Tony remained with the childless couple at their cottage in the upland hamlet of Carno, speaking only Welsh, for three years before his mother sent for him. He wrote much later, ‘Born in the middle of Wales, I grew up with a taste for two tongues and a sense that things were not always what they appear to be.’ He returned to Auntie Mary and Uncle Elfyn for every holiday, and they indulged his obsessive drawing, carefully keeping everything he did.

Tony’s education began alongside his sisters in a convent school for girls and ballet classes – he liked to claim that the latter helped him keep a slim and dainty figure all his life. He then passed time without distinction at St Mary’s College in Rhos-on-Sea, where he spent days staring at the sea and suffered corporal punishment from the Oblate brothers for doing very little work – perhaps helping to propel him to the merchant navy at 15. His experiences for the next two years across the oceans fed his personal mythology much more dramatically: in one story the boy steered a ship single-handedly around the Needles while his captain and the crew slumbered blind-drunk below.

After the navy Tony was offered a place at Manchester School of Art, but his local education authority refused him a grant for a non-vocational course, and he instead spent a year at Wrexham College of Art in 1962-3, taking a Diploma in Art and Design. At the end of the course he and a friend decided to hitch-hike to London in search of adventure, but they only got as far as Cardiff. In a pub he spied a local girl, Janice Morgan, and confided to his friend that he liked the look of her. He offered to carry her bags home on the bus, and they were married shortly afterwards, in 1965, both aged 21. It was typical both that he made a bad first impression on his future mother-in-law (introducing himself as ‘Anton’ and horrifying her with his long hair and thigh-length leather boots), and that she adored him within two days. Janice and he went on to have four children: Dorian, Brienne, Lucian and Frances, and at the time of his death were due to celebrate their forty-second wedding anniversary.

An inheritance from Tony’s father on coming of age changed the young couple’s fortunes, and they bought a house at Llanfairfechan. He supported their growing family by working (variously) as sea-lion trainer at the Welsh Mountain Zoo, pig farmer and jobbing builder. However, painting was by now his central activity, and he was elected a Royal Cambrian Academician at the atypically youthful age of 34.

In 1979, when South Glamorgan County Council advertised the first ever artist’s residency Llanover Hall in Cardiff, Janice filled out the application forms and they moved back to her home town. It was only a one-year appointment, but Tony never left. Llanover Hall had already become a friendly community arts centre, on the borders of Canton, Llandaff and Pontcanna, and here Tony’s talent to engage all kinds and conditions of people found their perfect home. He became a much-loved educator, helping thousands to develop their creativity. The centre supported children, local professionals and artists’ groups, students wanting help to get a portfolio together to apply for art college, and amateur painters attending summer schools and evening classes. Over the next 28 years Tony served variously as Warden, Tutor, Director and Gallery Director. He arranged numerous exhibitions, for artists’ groups, students and individual artists. (He hung the work of fellow artists just two days before his death.) He wrote in 2004, ‘Llanover has always had an open-door policy, opening the door to all who want to make art… It has become a unique place – a place like nowhere else – a place that couldn’t be planned by some management-speak bureaucratic paper-clip committee.’

He had a spectacularly ability, when teaching, to create phrases that hung in the memory, invariably turning humour to advantage to put his point across. The playful mysticism of his own work is echoed in his assertion, ‘Painting is just a pigment of my imagination.’ He told young children, with whom he had a special rapport, ‘To be an artist you have to have one eye closed and one open – one eye open to see the world and one eye closed to see inside.’

Tony’s work is in the collections of the National Museum of Wales, Leeds Museum, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society for Wales among others. Among commissions that he carried out are a reredos at St Saviour’s Church in Splott Road, Cardiff (1988), and, completed shortly before he died, a Risen Christ for St Mary’s in Bute Street. He showed widely with the Welsh Group and at the Royal Cambrian Academy, the National Eisteddfod and the Royal Academy. His major exhibition, Dream-Seeds, was held at the Glynn Vivian in 1995. In 2004, a wondrous retrospective at Llanover Hall (titled 25 Years in Residence) spilled out of the gallery itself and spread into almost every room. Friends got together to produce, alongside the exhibition catalogue, a booklet in which they could make their personal tributes, unembarrassedly praising his inspiration, kindness and support.

Tony was well known in the artistic community for his willingness to give his time to support others and take on responsibilities. He Chaired the Association of Artists and Designers in Wales, and continued to work for its artists’ benevolent fund. When Llanover Hall was identified for closure by Cardiff City Council, he spearheaded the successful campaign to save it, bearing banners down to the National Assembly for Wales. He taught children and adults across south Wales, though preferring evening classes that left the days free for painting. In 1998, he took on the Chairmanship of the Welsh Group after ten years serving on its committee. He took the opportunity at the opening of its fiftieth-anniversary exhibition at the National Museum of Wales to call passionately for a dedicated gallery of modern art – a project that was not then well received by the Museum authorities but has since become official policy.

Several hundred friends, family members, students and supporters filled the nave of Llandaff Cathedral for Tony Goble’s funeral on 27 April 2007. A memorial fund is being established in his name.

Peter Wakelin

Parts of this obituary were published in The Guardian, 27 April 2007. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007.

Donations to the memorial fund may be made payable to A.R. Mansell ACIB, and sent to Department 231, 61 Wellfield Road, Cardiff CF24 3DG.