Kyffin Williams’ Wild Welsh Landscapes Leap Off the Canvas in New Immersive Experience

In recent years, the canvases of artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and David Hockney have been reimagined in all-singing, all-dancing immersive exhibitions. Now one of Wales’s most celebrated artists, Sir Kyffin Williams, has been given the same treatment.

Renowned for depicting the dramatic landscapes of his homeland through thick layers of paint applied with a palette knife, Williams has been brought to vivid new life at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, where many of the hundreds of his works held in the collection have been animated and set to music.

On screen, Williams’ farmers and sheepdogs trek across rugged terrain, his waves appear to crash around the exhibition space, and dark grey mountains rise up as a sun sinks into the sea.

Morfudd Bevan, the library’s art curator, said a central aim of the project was to introduce Williams, who died in 2006, and the library itself to new and younger audiences.

“Kyffin is one of Wales’s most important artists and he was embraced by the public,” she said. “His work romanticised Wales, encapsulated the meaning of the country and the idea of hiraeth [a Welsh word with no direct translation but which means something like a feeling of homesickness for a place that no longer exists or perhaps never did].”

Bevan noted that the library’s ties to Williams date back to 1950, when it acquired an oil painting of the beloved Welsh mountain Cadair Idris from him for £15 while he was teaching art in London. The work would now be worth tens of thousands of pounds.

After Williams returned to his birthplace of Ynys Môn (Anglesey) in north Wales, he became a regular visitor to the library. “Someone would call ‘Kyffin’s here!’ and people would go down and have a cup of tea with him,” Bevan recalled.

Upon his death, Williams bequeathed his estate to the library, making it the largest custodian of his work anywhere in the world: 200 oil paintings, 300 original prints and more than 1,000 works on paper.

These pieces are kept in a storeroom in the depths of the building, where visitors can book an appointment to view them or have them brought up to the reading room, where easels are set out for display.

Visitors can also inspect his palette, his paint-spattered telephone and the pair of boots he wore while wandering the region’s hills and valleys, all of which are stored there too.

The bilingual immersive experience, however, aims to place the artwork firmly in the spotlight. Staged across three rooms near one of the main entrances, with views over the town and sea, the exhibition offers an intimate alternative to the larger shows devoted to Van Gogh, Cézanne and Hockney.

Smaller in scale and therefore more personal, the experience admits just 10 people at a time, and admission is free.

In the first room, Williams’ story is narrated by the singer Sir Bryn Terfel, himself an avid collector of the artist’s work. In the second, visitors can sit or stand as landscapes, seascapes and bold blocks of colour swirl across the walls, floor and ceiling, accompanied by a Welsh chamber-folk string trio.

The third room features a remarkable digital rendering of one of Williams’ self-portraits, which visitors can touch to feel the sheer thickness of his paint, particularly dense around the moustache.

Dennis Outten, chief executive of Focal Studios, the show’s lead designers, said one of the main challenges had been projecting Williams’ landscapes without sacrificing their texture.

Outten explained that the team spent months living with the paintings from the stores, working out how best to convey the sense of Williams’ bold palette knife technique.

“We felt the pressure,” he said. “You want to be true to his life, his work, his methods, and he’s not around to give us any feedback.”

Delicate artistic choices had to be made, from how to animate his farmers’ movements to exactly which colours to use as a Williams sun sets into the sea. Even so, Outten believes the artist would have relished the exhibition’s playful spirit.

“He was a cheeky chap, an amazing raconteur and an educator. We think he would have liked our approach.”

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