Cruel Pictures and Beautiful Photographs: Caradog Prichard and Brenda Chamberlain.

Though Aberstwyth is in Wales it only feels welsh in its National Library.  Though there are many more Welsh writers than Dylan and R.S Thomas their heritage becomes more apparent, more diverse, then it would first appear.

The National Library is running a year long exhibition of two welsh writers; Caradog Prichard and Brenda Chamberlain, both of particular renown having both won recognition from The National Eisteddfod festival, both in their art handle natural lyricism and inherited depression; the almost defining characteristics of Welsh literature and landscape.  With black pens they write beautiful descriptions of the world wars period.

Caradog was a journalist for The Daily Telegraph who was happy and contented with his job, with feelings of guilt and inadequacy.  A jolly man whose father died in a quarry accident and whose mother was sent to an asylum before his twentieth birthday in 1924.  Tory, Royalist, Welsh Patriot, he wrote the autobiographical masterpiece Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlight Night) about the cruelties of childhood in wartime.  The photographs of Caradog shows a kind, warm and intelligent man who also bears his responsibilities and sadness.  Looking at his bright smile it’s unsettling to know he could write such works as Terfysgoedd daear (Earthly Turmoil), a long poem justifying suicide.  His only novel was very much in keeping with the modernist literature of the time with its interest in streams of consciousness and the disjointing of time continually undermining realist understanding with more subjective modes of writing.  Admittedly he himself says that he writes ‘unreal pictures seen in the twilight’.

Prichard’s description of his writing would equally describe the paintings of Brenda Chamberlain.  The two Self portraits of Brenda in the gallery, for instance, are gothic, gloomy with echoes of Czech romantic poets, unstable and precise in their beauty; reflecting both her natural innocent artistic talents and her deeply fatalistic nature.  She died in 1971 from financial difficulties, loneliness, depression and finally an overdose on sleeping pills.  In her youth she had spent hours on the mountains of Snowdonia with her husband, walking, drawing, painting and writing.  Determined to live from her art Brenda settled on Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) after traveling to Germany.  There she wrote the pastoral journal Tide Race depicting her time on the island and of the people who lived there.  Consistently poetic her writing communicates her love of descriptions from movements of animals to moments of time sprinkled and supplemented with pictures and poems.  The variety of her works shows her to be a true poet and artist at heart, living only to capture the world in words or paints.

With Chamberlain’s island and Prichard’s newspapers the two writers show in their photographs and pictures Welsh modes of living can be very different but Welsh modes of writing are often very similar: both being personal in their pain and poetic in their pleasure.