Visual Arts | Brynhyfryd by Elfyn Lewis

Visual Arts | Brynhyfryd by Elfyn Lewis

Wales Arts Review presents an image gallery of the new exhibition from Elfyn Lewis, with introduction by Gustav Dunck.

Elfyn Lewis’s new show, Brynhyfryd, at the Canvas Gallery is a vivid exploration of the boundary between the abstract and the formal. Swirling colours that could be the edge between land and sky in the high mountains or just as easily swirls in the painter’s imagination compete for attention in this ambitious show. Lewis has been a working artist for twenty-five years, steadily building a reputation and an impressive body of work. He won the Gold Medal for Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod in 2009 and the Welsh Artist of the Year Award in 2010 for his painting Pwll Crochan. His early, Rothko-inspired bold lines and bands of abstract expressionism, have developed into more nuanced, palette knife orchestrations of landscapes of the imagination.

As a north Walian, the mountains seem to be a recurring image in this selection of his work and there are some echoes of Kyffin Williams in the use of the palette knife on the granite and shale of places shattered and sculpted by time. But Lewis is no romantic of an imagined past, his work is of the here and now, filled with colour and a raw bright optimism of a lovely hill in summer.

 

Eryri (20 x 17 inches acrylic on paper 2017)
Cwsg (8.5 x 8.5 inches acrylic on paper 2017)
Sefyll yma ( 16 x 16 inches acrylic on paper 2017)
Cerrig-duon (20 x 20.5 inches acrylic on paper 2017)

 

Brynhyfryd
Runs until 29th July
Oriel Canvas 44a Glamorgan Street, Cardiff CF5 1QS