The View: Darryl Corner
Western Mail
Western Mail, April 20, 2010
REVIEW: Ifor Pritchard @ Kooywood Gallery, Cardiff until April 22
IFOR Pritchard, now 70, was raised in the close-knit village of Carmel in Gwynedd and in his paintings he draws on his memories of the local slate quarries that, even back in the ’40s, were already in decline.
He has described the life of the mining communities as claustrophobic. It’s a feeling you certainly pick up on in his recent paintings.
His subject matter reveals the life and work of those who moved in a small world between the graft of the quarries and chapel on Sundays.
Many focus on the back breaking work of quarrying itself, then largely done by hand.
In Daily Danger, the men are perched precariously between the rock faces deep in the narrow chasms, roped on to the walls.
Similarly The Face Men shows the workers, again hanging on ropes, feet splayed, straddling the narrow gap between rock faces, attacking the guts of the mountain with hammers. It’s a life few of us could imagine.
But Pritchard brings it to life because of a remarkable fusion between subject and style.
Slate splits into regular layers or fissures, which is Pritchard’s style and technique; short, thick, regular impasto knife strokes somehow echo this geology.
His thick shards of colour have hard edge – it’s very tactile. You often feel the quarry workers he depicts, with fondness and great respect, are themselves hewn from the rock. They have a solidity and a square set roughness.
His thick wedges of paint often sit between heavy black outlines. It could easily get too ponderous and laboured, but it’s all done with immense confidence and an economy of action.
Like the man with the hammer preparing to strike the stone, Pritchard knows just how it is going to split. His palette, often earthy greys and greens, perfectly echoes the slate itself.
In Miles To Walk, my favourite of the images here, men come out from a group of cottages to head to work. They are all muffled against the winter in a uniform of heavy overcoat and cap pulled down against the bitter wind.
As if the labour itself wasn’t hard enough, quarry workers often faced long walks of many miles simply to get to work.
They lean together into the driving wind and snow, unified with parallel strokes of the painting knife.
For some people, images like this simply feed into a well-worn, nostalgic view of life in a Wales gone by.
It’s an easy accusation but what sets Pritchard apart is that his work is hard won from his own memories. It’s an authentic depiction of an austere life from someone who witnessed it for themselves

Western Mail
December, 2009
Five years of Cardiff’s Kooywood Gallery

By Karen Price, Western Mail

It’s five years since Cardiff’s Kooywood Gallery first opened its doors. Karen Price speaks to owner Rhian Kooy about her love of art

GARETH PARRY and Liam O’Connor are two artists who are receiving much attention outside Wales these days. Parry recently staged his first solo show in London at Kensington’s Thackeray Gallery while O’Connor received commissions from a Switzerland hotel.

Both artists are among those who have been championed by the Kooywood Gallery in Cardiff over the past five years.

Opened in 2004 by Rhian Kooy and Roger Wood, its aim was to support emerging talent as well as established artists.

As the gallery celebrates its fifth birthday this month, the ethos remains the same.

The anniversary exhibition is the first joint show for husband and wife artists, Robert McPartland and Stephanie Tuckwell.

“Robert produces some very bold still lifes while Stephanie’s are much quieter,” says Kooy.

“Robert held an exhibition here two years ago. His works take a long time to produce. I suggested a joint exhibition with Stephanie, who won the University of Glamorgan’s Purchase Prize last year, and he was completely taken with the idea. Their works are so different but they complement each other.”

Many of the regular artists who exhibit at Kooywood have also produced one-off pieces for the gallery’s anniversary show and some new paintings have been released from artist Eric Malthouse’s estate.

Kooy has always had a passion for art, which isn’t surprising when you consider that her neighbour while growing up on Anglesey was Sir Kyffin Williams and that husband and wife artists Gwilym Pritchard and Claudia Williams were close friends of her parents.

In fact, her mother gave her money for her 18th birthday so she could buy her first piece of art.

“It was a painting of the Menai Bridge,” she says.

“I was going off to university so it was a piece of my childhood which I could take with me.”

Although the mother-of-one carved out a career in business – her first job was working on transport initiatives for the Welsh Office – her love of art has never left her.

Now head of business development, marketing and communications at PricewaterhouseCoopers, she introduced art into meeting spaces at her workplace in Cardiff along with colleague Wood.

But soon the pair decided to set up their own gallery and in 2004 Kooywood opened its doors for the first time.

Since then, the gallery has hosted a wealth of exhibitions by established and emerging artists and among those who have shown there are Chris Griffin, Stephen John Owen, Mike Monaghan and this year’s National Eisteddfod Gold Medal winner Elfyn Lewis.

Kooy, who runs the gallery alongside her full-time job at PWC, admits that she often falls in love with the pieces on the walls.

“I go in there sometimes and it’s like being a child in a sweet shop,” laughs Kooy.

“Of course, it’s a commercial gallery and it has to be run on a commercial basis so I can’t forget that.”

Kooy is pleased that up-and-coming artists are well-represented by the gallery.

“I want to put art in that I like – there’s no doubt about that,” she says. “But I wanted to be prepared to take a bit of a gamble with new and emerging artists.”

She says the highlight during the last five years has been seeing artists who have been represented by Kooywood go on to receive acclaim outside Wales.

“Gareth Parry had such an overwhelming response from the Thackeray Gallery in London. To be a part of that in a small way was a great highlight for me.”

Although Kooywood was still a relatively new gallery when the recession hit, Kooy says business is still doing well.

“People’s buying habits have changed – they are buying more safely now,” she says.

“They are buying work by established artists so for the time being it is a bit more difficult for emerging artists.”

So would she do it all again?

“It’s been 10 times harder than I thought it would ever be,” she says of opening the gallery.

“Would I do it again? Of course I would do it again. Maybe I’d do it slightly differently but it’s been an opportunity to do something a bit different and be a bit bold.”

The work of Robert McPartland and Stephanie Tuckwell is displayed at the Kooywood Gallery, Cardiff, from November 18 to December 24