Sir Kyffin Williams; Times (UK) obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
The TimesSeptember 02, 2006
Sir Kyffin Williams
May 9, 1918 - September 1, 2006
Painter who celebrated the landscapes and people of his
beloved North Wales with passion and humour
SIR KYFFIN WILLIAMS was a portraitist, a painter of North
Welsh landscapes and seascapes, and an amused chronicler of
his own and other people's foibles.
Rain-lashed, green-grey landscapes, stormy, slate-grey
seascapes and weather-beaten, pink-grey farmers are the
recurring themes of Williams's art, sketched and, in many
cases, painted outdoors in his beloved North Wales.
There was never anything precious about Williams's attitude
to his art. One of his trademarks was that he would knead
and model his oil paints with a palette knife, regardless of
whether or not this was fashionable with the art
establishment (and it was not).
"You can use a pair of nail scissors or hose pipes. But a
palette knife? No. It's incredible the rules they have," he
told Artists & Illustrators magazine this year.
He was an unassuming man, only too happy for an oil he was
painting to be inadvertently improved by its toppling, face
down, on to his new tweed hat, or for the texture of a
watercolour, being tackled al fresco on the windy shore of
Llanddwyn, to be helped along by the addition of wind-blown
sand.
Williams had a way with words as well. His autobiography,
Across the Straits (1973), immortalises in print his skills
as a raconteur as he decries his own tennis ability (his
forehand drive "was practically unreturnable and certainly
if it was returned I was so surprised that I lost the
point") or is astonished by the high-handedness of a
certain Lord Davies, who decided when everyone in Llandinam
should be in bed by turning the master switch that plunged
the village into darkness "at an annoyingly early hour".
Born the younger son of a bank manager in Llangefni,
Anglesey, and descended from a long line of Welsh clergymen,
John Kyffin Williams left Shrewsbury School in 1935, with an
art prize under his arm. He was articled to a firm of land
agents in Pwllheli, enthusiastically pursuing country sports
in his spare time, and also joining the 6th Battalion Royal
Welch Fusiliers, Territorial Army, at the suggestion of a
friend who shared his passion for shooting and considered
rightly that this might be an opportunity for more of it.
Between signing his military papers and receiving his
commission, Williams experienced his first attack of
epilepsy, an affliction the Army was to tolerate for five
years - enjoyable ones for Williams - until he was invalided
out, much against his will, in 1941, still in his early
twenties.
A doctor proposed that he take up art, and Williams did just
that, later blessing his epilepsy for having steered him in
this direction. Professor Randolph Schwabe, who interviewed
him for the Slade, was, said the ever-self-depreciating
Williams, "surprised at my inability and obvious lack of
talent but in his kindly way suggested that I should enter
for a term to see how things went".
However, the former soldier not only did well enough to last
the full three-year course, but also managed to secure both
the Slade Portrait Prize and the Robert Ross Leaving
Scholarship.
Crucially, the teaching of drawing was one of the Slade's
great strengths, and as Williams wrote in his 2001 book,
Drawings: "Paintings are often laboured things, and when
worked upon over a period of time they tend to lose the
initial excitement of conception. Drawings are usually
fresh; they tell us much about the artist who created them."
In later life he mourned the disappearance of
draughtsmanship from the curriculums of art colleges. "It
has been absolutely criminal the way they have not been
teaching drawing," he complained in his eighties.
In 1944 he started teaching art at Highgate School, London,
a post he held until retiring to Wales, aged 55, in 1973. In
the long school holidays he escaped to Wales to paint and
draw.
"I have been lucky to have been born into such a land and .
. . to have been given a life that has been long enough for
me to put down my appreciation of it," he wrote.
And if a violent desire to paint (maybe caused or at least
exaggerated by his epilepsy) overcame him in term time, when
he should have been teaching, two of his pupils - Anthony
Green and Patrick Procktor - still coped well enough to
become Royal Academicians themselves.
Williams's first one-man exhibition was at Colnaghi in
London in 1948. He also showed at the Leicester Galleries,
the Thackeray Gallery and the Royal Academy, at the Glynn
Vivian Museum & Art Gallery, Swansea, the Albany Gallery and
Howard Roberts Gallery, both in Cardiff, the Tegfryn
Gallery, Menai Bridge, and the National Library of Wales,
Aberystwyth. He had his first retrospective exhibition at
the National Museum of Wales in 1987.
And at Oriel Ynys Môn, in his native Llangefni, there were
retrospectives of portraits (1993), landscapes (1995) and
drawings (1998). Of these, the portraits show proved the
most popular and indeed he always considered his portraits
his most important works.
In 1968 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to
record the Welsh in Patagonia, where he stayed for six
months, making hundreds of sketches, from many of which he
produced oil paintings on his return.
He was president of Wales's fine arts institution, the Royal
Cambrian Academy, 1969-76, and again from 1992 to the
present. He also became a vice-president of the Honourable
Society of Cymmrodorion, founded in 1751 for the
encouragement of literature, science and the arts. He was a
Deputy-Lieutenant for Gwynedd in 1986, and among other
laurels became an honorary fellow of University College,
Swansea, University College, Bangor, and the University
College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He was elected an associate
of the Royal Academy in 1970, becoming a Royal Academician
four years later.
A generous supporter of his local community, he gave drawing
lessons in Gwynedd primary schools; judged, and donated the
main prize for a Welsh national drawing competition; and
served as patron of the Bardsey Island Trust, whose
protection of that island's wildlife and ecosystem was a
cause close to his heart. And he regularly donated drawings
and prints to be auctioned for local causes. He gave 350
drawings, and some oil paintings, to the Anglesey museum and
art gallery, Oriel Ynys Môn, which is raising funds to build
a permanent home (to be known as the Kyffin Williams
Gallery) for this collection.
Having selected art for the National Eisteddfod of Wales
several times between 1955 and 1989, in later years Williams
became exasperated with some of the works receiving awards
there (as indeed he did with winners of the Turner Prize).
In 2005, when the Eisteddfod's fine-art medal was won by a
video installation showing people in combat fatigues burning
a garden shed, he was not alone in thinking it was "like
awarding the championship in the Welsh Black cattle class to
a sheep".
If anything, his new "grumpy old man" image boosted his
popularity beyond his already very wide circle of friends.
He had been knighted in 2000, but in 2006 there was a
tribute of another kind from James Dean Bradfield, frontman
of the Welsh rock band, the Manic Street Preachers. A track
called Which Way To Kyffin? featured on Bradfield's debut
album as a solo artist, and was explained thus by the rock
star, 50 years Williams's junior: "I was in West Wales last
year and I had this feeling where I didn't want to go back
to London and was really fighting not to go back. I just
felt like driving up to Anglesey to find Kyffin Williams."
The Government Art Collection, Arts Council of Great
Britain, National Museum of Wales, National Portrait Gallery
and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, hold examples of Williams's
work.
There is a Welsh saying that every Welsh home must have a
harp in the corner and a Kyffin on the wall, and at the
Albany Gallery in 2004 people queued for three days and
nights for one of his previews, eager to buy particular
pictures.
Compulsively interested in Wales, its people, landscape,
archaeology, wildlife and country sports, Williams wrote
that he learnt most about the mountains from following the
Ynysfor Hounds. He loved swapping stories with farmers, and
many found their way into his autobiography.
He never married, but was said to have been engaged three
times, the obstacle to each match apparently having been his
epilepsy, which did not ease until later in his life.
Sir Kyffin Williams, OBE, painter and teacher, was born on
May 9, 1918. He died on September 1, 2006, aged 88.