Kyffin Williams’ Seascapes

Kyffin Williams’ emotive seascapes which are on display in the artist’s centenary exhibition here at the National Library, should be celebrated in their own right and stand apart from the artist’s other more well-known works. Kyffin’s highly expressionistic style within these monochrome works manages to convey the movement and the violence of a storm at sea in in a tremendously effective manner, reflecting the artist’s own hidden inner turmoil.

Kyffin’s connection to Trearddur Bay, which is located on the west coast of Holy Island off the coast of Anglesey where many of these seascapes were based can be traced back to the artist’s childhood. As a young boy of six years old who would turn 7 the following week he was sent to Trearddur Bay Boarding School in May 1925. He stated in his memoir ‘Across the Straits’: ‘It did not take me long to fall under the spell of the island’s mood. The storms, the sea mists, the wrecks, the wailing sirens, and in summer the peculiar haze that hung over the island, all made Trearddur Bay a very special place’.

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The expressionistic impasto technique used in such works as ‘Stormy Sea’ was explained by the artist in the book ‘The Land and the Sea’, 1998: ‘These great storms have always excited me and I seem to be stimulated by the noise and energy of the waves – to such an extent that, when I transfer my frenzied scribbles onto canvas, my own energy attacks the canvas…These paintings are not easy to control for often they try to take over and I lose my tones in a confusion of white wave and spray… My personal chemistry demands the excitement of a storm at sea.’

As the authors Rian Evans and Nicolas Sinclair stated in the recently published work, ‘The Light and the Dark’ on Kyffin’s life, the artist who had suffered with the afflictions of epilepsy and depression throughout his life acknowledged that he expressed his most turbulent feelings through his seascapes. In an interview in 2000, the artist stated that it was due to his battle with epilepsy that he felt a need to apply strongly contrasting colours down onto the canvas, as can be seen in these seascapes. He stated: ‘It might be part of the epilepsy, the excitement – the epileptic shock of dark against light, it’s very exciting you see. Van Gogh was an epileptic and he had the same love of contrast’. Inspired by other notable palette knife users such Gustave Courbet and Van Gogh, Evans and Sinclair also saw a parallel within Kyffin’s seascapes to other iconic works such as Hokusai’s ‘The Wave’ and August Strindberg’s dramatic seascapes. The artist would return to paint the subject throughout his life.

Morfudd Bevan – Art Curator

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