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Alfred Janes memorably described himself not as a painter but as “a maker of pictures”. Over a long career the artist worked in a range of styles and subject matter, from still lifes, portraits, semi figurative and abstract images to constructions with traditional and modern materials, ranging from oil paint and pastel to paper and perspex. His remarkable body of work, created over sixty years, is revealed here by seventy works and related photographs, many previously unpublished, including ten signature images.
Born in Swansea in 1911, he 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 Gang’ 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 was studying at the Royal Academy Schools. But Janes had discovered modernism, exhibiting in London alongside artists including Picasso, Miro, and Matisse, and he left the Academy.
War interrupted this highly promising career, a period recorded in hitherto unpublished letters to his wife, Mary, and he returned to Swansea.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 College of Art, where his colleagues included Bridget Riley. He began using new materials including glass, perspex, marbles, and PVA paints, 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. It is only now that the full scope of his considerable originality and achievement is being revealed.
