Peter Prendergast; Telegraph obit (Welsh painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 20/01/2007 Telegraph
Peter Prendergast, who has died aged 60, was a
passionately committed landscape and figurative artist in
his native Wales.
Born on October 27 1946 at Abertridwr, in the Aber
valley near Caerphilly, Peter Prendergast was the son of a
miner with Irish roots. Peter failed the 11-plus and would
probably have spent his working life shifting coal had he
not been inspired by an art master at the local secondary
modern school to take up painting.
Early works by the young Prendergast - displaying the
glowering colours within a sturdy architecture of drawing
which would remain hallmarks of his art - were enough to
secure him a place at Cardiff School of Art and he then
progressed to the Slade in London, where he was taught by
Frank Auerbach.
At the Slade Prendergast won the Nettleship Prize for
figurative painting and also met his wife, Lesley Riding. He
then took an MA at Reading University. Although determined
to succeed as an artist, Prendergast accepted that he would
need to teach in order to make ends meet.
His belief in sound draughtsmanship and acute
observation was, however, out of tune with the times, and a
part-time teaching post at Liverpool School of Art was
terminated after four years; by this time he was 27 and the
father of two children.
In 1970 the Prendergasts had moved to Bethesda, a
village in north Wales which supplied labour for the Penrhyn
slate quarry, where he was able to find some teaching work
locally while pursuing his painting undisturbed.
Six years later the family moved to a house beside the
stone bridge which the quarrymen crossed on their way to
work, and which the German émigré artist Martin Bloch had
included in powerful pictures of the area in the 1950s.
Prendergast was now in the heart of his own painting.
His method was to wander over the wild and working
landscapes of western Snowdonia making copious notes,
drawings and sketches in watercolour. Back in his studio the
masterly oils would emerge with subtle, and sometimes
dramatic, rearrangements. He was after the essence of a
scene, never a literal reproduction.
If Prendergast's craggy images sometimes seemed to be
constructed from pit props and set beneath slate skies, they
always exuded the brooding, bracing sense of a harshly
elemental existence.
Textures were rough and dense. Colours (red, ochre,
gold, blue, black) were by turns dark and fiery.
Prendergast was a supreme painter of weather, with a
preference for storm and tumult; his canvases could appear
drenched or blasted or frosted. His quarry panoramas were
ideally suited for the Welsh Art Council's 1981 show The
Dark Hills, The Heavy Clouds.
He won prizes at the National Eisteddfod in 1975 and
1977, and in the latter year the art historian Lewis Allen
bought a painting for the Contemporary Art Society of Wales;
the society later acquired more pictures, distributing some
to galleries across the principality.
An oil of Penrhyn Quarry was claimed by the Tate in
1984, and further studies went to the British Museum and to
public galleries in Czechoslovakia and Germany.
Prendergast's work was shown from Australia to
America, and in the 1990s, on a visit to New York, he
created some impressive paintings of Manhattan.
In Wales he was commissioned by the National Trust to
paint the Nant Ffrancon valleys and (naturally) the Penrhyn
Quarry, and by the National Museum of Wales to portray
Blaenau Ffestiniog.
He featured in numerous commercial galleries, being
represented in London for many years by Agnew's before
moving with his lifelong friend Len Tabner to Messum's in
2006. Last year Prendergast had a major retrospective at the
Welsh Museum of Modern Art, at Machynlleth.
He collapsed from a heart attack on January 14 while
walking with his wife in one of the slate quarries near
Caernarvon which dominated his life and art. He was at the
peak of his powers, and Wales has now lost three consummate
artists (Prendergast, Sir Kyffin Williams and John Addyman)
in less than a year.
Peter Prendergast is survived by his wife, two sons
and two daughters.