David Jones at Capel-y-ffin
Peter Wakelin explores the profound effects of Capel-y-ffin on the genius of modernist David Jones.
In an exclusive extract from a new evaluation of the artist, Peter Wakelin explores the profound effects of Capel-y-ffin on the genius of modernist David Jones as a new exhibition of Jones' work opens to run over the summer at y Gaer: Brecknock Museum, in Brecon.
Intense experiences of new places can be turning points in the creative lives of artists. David Jones identified his periods living and working at Capel-y-ffin in the mid-1920s as ‘a new beginning’: ‘My subsequent work can, I think, be truthfully said to hinge on that period.’ His experiences comprised both revelation and inspiration. So sure was he of his new direction that when he went home he burned almost all his earlier paintings. Though his work continued to change and develop thereafter, Capel persisted in his visual and poetic imagination for the rest of his life.
The experience of place was especially fertile for British artists who were drawn to the mood of neo-romanticism between the early 1930s and the early 1950s. Like Jones, they cross-fertilised the innovations of modernism with an appreciation of landscape’s associations and evocations, taking a step away from the purely formal, visual values that had predominated in the era of Post-Impressionism. One of neo-romanticism’s preoccupations was with genius loci or spirit of place. From the beginning of his Capel years, Jones can be seen as a precursor to this movement – perhaps a pioneer. His sense of nature as sacrament and sign emerged explicitly in paintings such as Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin and implicitly in many others. It was expounded later in poems such as ‘The Tutelar of the Place’ and ‘The Sleeping Lord’.
Diverse artists of Jones’s era found encountering a new place to be an impetus to creative reinvention, among them Graham Sutherland and Barbara Hepworth. Sutherland wrote that the jagged ancient landscape around St Davids in Pembrokeshire, which he first visited in 1934, had ‘taught’ him to paint: ‘From the first moment I set foot in Wales I was obsessed’. Hepworth’s sculpture shifted after she moved to St Ives in Cornwall in 1939 from geometrical abstraction towards rhythms observed in rocks and waves.
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This is an extract from the catalogue essay by Peter Wakelin accompanying the exhibition Hill-rhythms: David Jones + Capel-y-ffin, 1 July to 29 October 2023, y Gaer: Brecknock Museum, Art Gallery and Library, Glamorgan Street, Brecon.