Notes on Newport, Cardiff, and Abertillery (February 18-20, 2025)

Learn to ride the punch.
I don’t live in the past; but I do allow the past to live in me.

February 18 (Tuesday). Newport (Gwent). There’s a cafe on Charles Street, to which I always head on arrival. It’s food is plain and unsophisticated, but prepared with love. And I always order a bacon sandwich (along with a cup of tea for one, served from a stainless-steel teapot): several greasy rashers pressed between two slices of flannel bread, liberally spread with margarine. The sandwich looks and tastes like the ones Dad made for me when I was young. And this is why I find it immensely satisfying.

In 1980, when a second-year fine art student, I lead an organising committee that oversaw the development of a major undergraduate exhibition, held at Newport Museum and Art Gallery. The curators were two influential London art critics: Lucy Tickner and Andrew Brighton. They chose very few, and often small, artworks with which to fill the capacious gallery. I ‘got it’. But few others involved (along with the public audience) did. The curatorial decision was as audacious as it was problematic.

On the gallery walls today were paintings that I’d known as a student. Some aren’t remarkable but, like the bacon sandwich, are enjoyable because of the associations and memories they engender. Some are remarkable, however. Tom Rathmell — who taught at Newport College of Art (as it was then titled) as Head of Fine Art and Vice-Principal is represented by Newport from Christchurch Road (1983/4). A painting by Jack Crabtree, who was one of my tutors in painting at the College, depicts the coal mining landscape of South Wales; another, by George Chapman, shows Merthyr Tydfil — the town at the heart of the industrial revolution in this country; and yet another by Roger Cecil — who, like me, studied at the College and heralded from Abertillery — depicts a harbour, boat, crucifix, and nude. It reminds me of Peter Lanyon’s last paintings, based on Cleveland Pier.

On every visit to Newport, my friend — the artist Mark Williams — and I commune at a local pub. What its menu promises and the chef offers are two entirely separate realities. Mark ate curry with rice and chips. (Culinary hybridity.) This is Indian food South Wales style. (My younger son and his wife are currently in India enjoying substantially better and more authentic fare.) Tom Rathmell’s daughter, Mark told me, had married the singer-songwriter Ian Dury (of the Blockheads fame) who, like Rathmell, had studied at the Royal College of Art.

Our meetings are ‘liturgical’. We discuss the same topics (although not our contrasting experiences of the ‘College’, on this occasion), sit at the same table (when possible), eat the same food, and order the same drinks. This is a communion that emphasises tradition rather than innovation. There’s comfort in the familiar. In a world of rapid and unsettling change, our breaking of bread together is a ‘still small [point] of calm’, to adapt a line from John Greenleaf Whittier’s hymn. Afterwards, Mark and I habitually ‘beat the bounds of the parish’, as it were, revisiting old haunts and following those routes we’d taken as students. We exchange memories, and laugh those exhausting and belly-aching laughs that make you feel younger.

February 19 (Wednesday). Cardiff. I travelled up St Mary Street, weaving my way through the arcades towards the market. The fishmongers there has been in business for as long as I can remember. While waiting for the National Museum Cardiff to open its doors at 10.00 am, I walked into the Gorsedd Gardens to see the circle of Gorsedd stones (Cerrig yr orsedd), which were originally set up in Cathays Park in 1899 to commemorate the National Eisteddfod held there, and subsequently moved to this present site in 1905, when Cardiff was granted city status. I’d drawn some of the stones in 1982, while waiting for my girl friend to finish her day’s studies at the Royal College of Music and Drama, close by. Through the act of drawing, those stones were internalised. I know them in a way that I don’t, those things which I haven’t drawn.

There were several groups of junior school pupils on a field trip when I entered the Museum’s concourse, no doubt bubbling with excitement in anticipation of seeing Nicholas Poussin’s Landscape with the Body of Phocion Carried Out of Athens (1648) and, of course, the dinosaur exhibit and gift shop too.

Several of the contemporary art and Welsh galleries were cordoned off. Water from the building’s flat roof had leaked into their interior. Budget cuts meant that maintenance projects were on hold. Saving money costs dearly, in the end. I took-in the historical collection.

Rome from the Ponte Mollo (about 1745) by Richard Wilson (the so-called ‘father of the English landscape tradition’, and the best thing to come out of Machynlleth) is one of the finest works in the collection and his oeuvre, in my opinion. The topography is of no particular interest to me; this is a vision of another time and a place that resembles, but is not of, this world. A dream of Wilson’s own making. A landscape to which, one might imagine, the souls of the departed migrate; a heaven on earth. There are few paintings from this period that can hold my attention for as long.

On my way out of the the Museum, I was reacquainted with two ceramic objects that had been companions on my first foray into the visual culture of religion, in 1982: a figurine of the Welsh Wesleyan minister John Bryan, and a stridently evangelistic wall plaque.

Before returning to the railway station for the train back to Newport, I luxuriated (as I’d done when a teenager and an art school student) in rifling through the vinyl record racks at Spillers — reputedly the oldest record shop in the world (albeit no longer on its original site). One of the pleasures of music (which those who know streamable platforms only cannot even begin to comprehend) is alighting upon a record by accident, holding it between two hands, appreciating the vinyl’s weight, admiring and reading the cover intently, and walking out of the shop with your purchase in a 12 x 12 inch carrier bag. ‘Joy unspeakable’.

Abertillery. I’d not experienced the valley and town under these conditions since I was a teenager. Fog occluded the mountain tops; the air was thick with moisture; and the late-afternoon light diminished visibly, minute by minute. A disquieting melancholy hung over the landscape.

Once upon a time, as Edmund Jones records, it was inhabited by malevolent fairies and other spirit entities. Today, I could well believe it. I walked through the town, over the Foundry Bridge, up Gladstone Street, and down Diamond Jubilee Terrace, to my late parents’ house.

Along the route, I photographed those parts of the environment that excluded signifiers of change that had taken place since my childhood. There was a moment when, it seemed, the intervening four decades slipped away temporarily. (Conditional time travel.)

After dinner (an acceptable bangers ‘n mash, followed by apple crumble and custard, at a local trough), I headed for the High Street, passed through the Arcade (a time portal, if ever there was one), and along Somerset Street to its intersection with Kings Street. Here, on the corner, still stands a Chinese takeaway — the first in the town — which opened in the mid 1970s. Quite possibly, the owners were the only Chinese family in our community. Their daughter (for whom I had a soft spot) attended my school. (My Mam had a Chinese friend in her school, but that was in the 1930s-40s and Blaina, 2.6 miles north of Abertillery.)

I was revisiting Abertillery to attend a local life-drawing class — another first for the town — which has been active since November 2024. It’s held upstairs at the Mitre Inn (which is doing a great deal to provide care, facilities, and activities for the locals). Revolutions have begun in upper rooms. While this one wasn’t on scale of the Last Supper and Day of Pentecost, its significance shouldn’t be underestimated. The setting for the class reminded me of a Lynchian interior; in particular, the room above the convenience store that Mike, Bob, and the other demons, inhabited in Twin Peaks. (‘I mean it like it is … like it sounds’.)

The class was conducted with due seriousness, professionalism, and decorum. Exercises began with two-minute poses, followed by progressively longer ones over a two-hour period. The students’ level of concentration was palpable. ‘You could feel the electricity’, I remarked at the end. In an age where our attention span is being atomised into sound, image, and text bites that we hardly attend to, as we scroll obsessively thorough our social media and new feeds, such an example of focus and intensity of application for so long was heartening. Having a thoughtful and capable model helps enormously, too. Each student, to a woman, expressed unstinting appreciation of the leaders’ constructive and compassionate support. They’ve evidently got the ‘right stuff’.

Having been introduced to the group, I fell automatically into the type of pep-talk mode that I would extemporise at the beginning my modules at the School of Art:

Life drawing is humiliating. We’re constantly confronted what what we cannot do. However, if we persevere, we realise that what seemed like an insuperable obstacle gradually diminishes as our powers of perception and dexterity grow. It’s an object lesson in how the challenges of life at large can me approached and overcome. And, therefore, a ground for self-confidence and hope too.

I was impressed by the leaders’ commitment and the students’ tenacity. Long may they mature and endure together. One of the leaders wrote to me the following day, acknowledging that setting up the class seemed to them an ‘obvious and necessary’ thing to do. I disputed their first point. Such things are only obvious to those with vision. And they’re a rare breed. The absence of any comparable provision in the locality is proof of my assertion. ‘Necessary’? Absolutely. None of those students present had ever been taught to draw in school, they confessed. (This lamentable state of affairs prevailed when I was in secondary education. It’s a disgrace.)

February 20 (Thursday). Newport. After breakfast, I walked across Newport City Footbridge to the town’s east side, and northwards along the muddy banks of the River Usk. There are still remnants of the old wharf platforms visible, along side which passenger steam boats, operating between Newport, Cardiff, Bristol, and Weston-Super-Mare, used to dock in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I touched the column at the entrance of my old art college before returning to town and the Public Library. As I write, I can hear the sound of a very happy and vocal crèche close by, singing ‘Old MacDonald’ and ‘Five Little Ducks’. I was tempted to join in. What happened to those ducklings who went swimming one day and, one-by-one, never returned. They suffered a dark fate, I fear. And how is it possible to swim ‘over the hill’? Perhaps they met their end by being squashed horribly in the jaws of one of stepped lock’s gates. My mind reeled.

1.00 pm: The journey home.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice