Bert Isaac; Welsh painter (lovely)
Hyfler/Rosner
Published: 07 April 2006
Robert Macdonald
Bert Isaac, painter and printmaker: born Cardiff 21 February
1923; married 1948 Joan Horsington (one daughter); died
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire 21 March 2006.
Beautiful work:
http://www.rwa.org.uk/isaac.htm
http://www.oldstilepress.com/Pagescreens/Isaac1.html
http://artinwales.250x.com/isaac2.JPG
The landscape artist Bert Isaac was a much-loved figure in
the Welsh art world and well-known across the border as a
teacher as well as a painter. He was a founder member of the
Welsh Group - the leading association of artists in Wales -
and also of the Watercolour Society of Wales, whose
forthcoming Spring Exhibition at St David's Hall, Cardiff,
will be dedicated to his memory.
It is often said that Wales has a musical but not a visual
culture, but this has changed radically in recent years with
the growth of large artistic communities in the south, north
and west. There are many incomers in these communities but
also home-grown artists like Isaac who returned to Wales
after years spent in England. Sadly the artistic
infrastructure has not kept pace with Welsh creativity.
There is no Welsh Museum of Contemporary Art, no specialist
magazine, few commercial galleries willing to take artistic
risks and few local journalists with an intelligent interest
in Welsh visual arts.
Significant artists such as Bert Isaac work in a cultural
vacuum. He had no gallery exhibiting him on a regular basis,
except the gallery he and his wife, Joan, created in their
own home where the front room and hall became large
exhibition spaces. Here they showed not only his own
pictures but paintings and sculptures by many other artists,
and exhibitions which were part of the annual Abergavenny
Festival.
Although increasingly disabled by Parkinson's disease in his
later years, Isaac kept on painting with remarkable vigour.
His work seemed to gain in strength of expression and in
vitality of colour as apparently his body grew weaker. He
was enabled to keep working by Joan, who helped him up the
stair-lift in their Abergavenny home and then pushed his
wheelchair to his studio easel. She would support him when
he rose to reach the tops of his pictures.
She also framed Bert's work and a poignant sight hanging by
their front door is his last completed painting, about four
feet across. It is almost abstract in its bold mark-making
but its structure is that of a large entrance leading from
the foreground to a space beyond. The Way Through is its
prophetic title.
Bert Isaac was born in Cardiff in 1923, and he studied at
Cardiff College of Art. As a student teacher there he worked
alongside Ceri Richards, but equally important influences
were the Neo-Romantics. In his early works there are
constant echoes of Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, John Piper,
Keith Vaughan, John Minton and Eric Ravilious. A number of
these artists had drawn inspiration from the Welsh landscape
with its heaving hills, rock formations, gnarled trees and
huddled woods.
The Welsh landscape is not tame. Nature fights back, and
Isaac enjoyed this sense of struggle - the sense that
humanity's handiwork is never permanent and that nature is
awesome and resurgent. He grew up in surroundings where the
wilderness of overgrown quarries and mines was only a short
step away. In later life he discovered the Dorothea Slate
Quarry near Caernarfon in North Wales. The cliffs and
flooded deeps provided him with subject matter over several
decades as he explored the rhythmic formations of the slate
workings, finding visual music in the shattered rock
formations and thrusting vegetation.
Over the years his style changed. The critic Peter Wakelin
wrote in 1998 that Isaac's work was deeply gestural.
"Everywhere are slashes, flecks, stabbed lines and textures,
suggestive of plant growth, wind and movement, or underlying
structures". From the "starved brush" techniques of the
Neo-Romantics he moved on to a much more fluid
expressionism, which took on an abstract quality reminiscent
of some Chinese landscape art - a flurry of mark-making
dependent on intuitive feeling rather than intellectual
control. Colour became dominant - singingblues, reds,
carmines and purples quite unlike the gloomy tones typical
of many other Welsh landscapists.
Bert Isaac spent many years teaching outside Wales. He
became Head of Art at Borough Road College in Middlesex, and
then at Battersea College of Education. He eventually joined
the Art and Design Department of the Institute of Education
at London University, where he worked until the 1980s. He
then returned to South Wales to live in Joan's home town,
Abergavenny - where her father had been three times mayor.
He won a gold medal at the National Eisteddfod in 1989 and
was appointed MBE in 1999.
As a painter and printmaker his output was enormous. In his
very last years, despite his illness, he continued to
produce around one large new work each month. Vast numbers
of Isaac's paintings, prints and drawings remain stored in
his home waiting for the day when posterity will stumble
upon his legacy. Happily, in his last year, this storehouse
was explored by Frances and Nicolas McDowall of the Old
Stile Press, Llandogo. They were shown a collection of
unpublished book designs that he had made in the 1940s, and
recently they published these as Books that Never Were
(2005).
This book reveals to the world Bert Isaac the Neo-Romantic,
but the powerful paintings of his last years, with their
freedom of colour and mark-making, are yet to receive a
major showing.