We are blessed with talented artists in this part of the world and I really enjoy working with them all to show all the creativity! Maybe we are all drawn to this place for similar reasons and share a desire to express what we see and experience here. It has been a great privilege to get to know Grahame Hurd-Wood as a friend and now to show some of his work in the gallery. We have a couple of his originals on display and their trademark inimitable colours and observations of the local coast would brighten any wall.
Many Welsh artists have portrayed our often dimly lit landscapes in dark tones and muted colours so it is a breath of fresh air to discover a colourist like Grahame who pushes the colours in his paintings almost to breaking point but still maintains a real semblance of what you can see around the coast here in its wonderful lighting. His skills have been developed with an education at Camberwell School of Art (BA hons) and later at the Royal Academy (MA) including time spent with the brilliant David Hockney.
Grahame’s landscape paintings are inspired by many places he has travelled to and have been shown and acquired all around the globe. We recently sold a print of his (Druidstone) to colour a sunny wall in Australia. And we have three other of his prints for sale here which you can view on his artist’s page.
But Grahame’s home is St Davids and he is a very popular and key person in this small city and often seen around in one of his varied vehicles with beloved Popachica, his chihuahua. Grahame’s originality is not limited to his style and observation, he also has great ideas and one of these has been to do small colour portraits of every inhabitant of St Davids. I think he is on number 840 now, many of which Imogen Wright scanned proficiently for him here at Rookwood. He has had wide celebration of this project with numerous TV interviews including by my brother Andy on Channel 4, and an exhibition of the St Davids portraits at the Senedd.
So please do have a look at his prints here on our site or drop in to see his original paintings of Solva with Poppachica and Porthgain, but if you want to see more of his originals and meet him in person he has his own gallery in New Street, St Davids.
