Gwilym Prichard: A Lifetime's Gazing

Heuser and Meyrick assess the work and career of Gwilym Prichard, one of the Wales' foremost 20th-century landscape painters. Since the 1950s, Prichard has been painting on Anglesey and in the foothills of Snowdonia. He has captured the season on the Llŷn Peninsula, where he grew up, and rocks and sea along the Pembrokeshire coast, where he lives now. His birthplace and his present home are no more than 135 miles apart, but the journey, much of which Prichard traveled alongside his wife, artist Claudia Williams, has been far from straightforward and had less than auspicious start. It entailed reconciling his life as an artist with the need to make a living as a teacher; providing a home for his four children without ever settling down for good; pulling up stakes and setting out anew at midlife on the Greek Islands, setting up studios in Brittany and Provence, and moving house some two dozen times along the way. In their subject matter, colours and media, Prichard’s oils, gouaches, watercolours, pastel and mixed media compositions chart the long, distinguished career of a man who ‘did not set out to be an artist’ but who continues to invigorate landscape art in a practice that is rooted in ‘a lifetime’s gazing’.