The Screen
Welsh Arts ArchiveBernard Mitchell
24 July - 28 August 2021
This showcase of portrait photographs by Bernard Mitchell is a work in progress. Bernard’s project to record artists and writers in their homes and studios continues as new figures emerge in the rich and diverse Welsh art world of today started in 1966 with the artists Ceri Richards, Alfred Janes, poet Vernon Watkins and composer Daniel Jones, The Swansea Friends of Dylan Thomas.
Bernard believes that it is by relating the internal to the external that an image best expresses the essence of a person. The portraits operate at two levels. Bernard’s observation of individual; artists, writers and musicians is at the same time an exploration of the proximities and distances between them and their surroundings. Each portrait is a self-contained art work, but when taken together the images amount to more than the sum of their parts. Bernard sees them as pieces in a jigsaw which, seen as a whole, presents a portrait of the Welsh art world today and since he started the Welsh Arts Archive in 1966.
Image: David Tress, Artist in his studio, in Haverfordwest
