Alfred Janes: Maker of Pictures

Ceri Thomas is a free-lance art historian, curator and artist. He has published books and exhibition catalogues on the artists Joan Baker, David Bell, Ogwyn Davies, Alan Salisbury and Ernest Zobole, and he was curator of art at the University of South Wales until 2017. He has curated exhibitions for the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, National Assembly for Wales, National Library of Wales (which holds examples of his art), National Waterfront Museum, Newport Museum and Art Gallery and the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art (of which he is a former President). He exhibits in Wales and abroad.

Born in Swansea in 1911, Janes was being described as a "brilliant young painter" just one year after he entered Swansea School of Art at sixteen. He developed an early interest in portraiture and still-life, and these two genres informed much of his subsequent career.In the 1930s, he was a member of the now legendary 'Kardomah Group' which included his close friends and contemporaries the poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, and the composer Daniel Jones. In 1934, Dylan Thomas shared digs with Janes in London, where the artist wasstudying at the Royal Academy Schools. But Janes had discovered modernism, exhibiting in London alongside artists including Picasso, Miro, and Matisse, and his studies were abandoned.War interrupted this highly promising career, a period recorded in hitherto unpublished letters to his wife, Mary, and he returned to Swansea. However, from 1963 until his death in 1999 he was based in London again, teaching part-time at Croydon School of Art, where his colleagues included Bridget Riley. He abandoned word paint and began using new materials including shattered windscreens and marbles, producing an array of modernist reliefs. He also resumed portraiture, experimented with collage, and, ever restless, began a new form of still-life painting that hovered between representation and pure abstraction. Some recognition began to come in the last ten years of his life but it is only now that the full scope of his considerable originality and achievement is being revealed. -- Publisher: Parthian Books