GEORGE LITTLE AND THE SWANSEA BLITZ
In his new book about George Little, Peter Wakelin writes about his long-delayed response to a subject seared into the artist’s vision as a boy, the Swansea Blitz of 1941.
For seven decades, the Swansea-born artist George Little recorded the sites of industry and the gaunt remains left behind by deindustrialisation and urban decay, making it his life’s work to explore their dramatic forms and startling colours in photographs, drawings and paintings.
Born in 1927, George grew up next to the abandoned copper works, slag heaps and still-busy docks of Dylan Thomas’s ‘ugly, lovely town’. He wrote in 2004: ‘Everywhere the images of my choice are disappearing: pithead wheels, slag heaps, heavy industry, the fishing industry, even the streets of workers’ houses, and the Swansea docks as I knew them are virtually no more … my subject matter is almost a memory.’
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