Cylchgronau Cymru

the West End. It is possible that within a month Griffiths' name will be familiar to those who care about art and that in the future his life will be freed from some of the hardships which his own single-mindedness has brought about. The brief facts of his life may be summarized thus. He was born in the Swansea Valley, a high-spirited, nervous lad, liked, as far as I can gather, by almost everyone who met him. Like the young Lawrence, you would have called him the plumber's mate who was almost certain to cause trouble,-something wild and defiant about him which caused authority to frown. He worked at a steel-works and then at the coal face. and then came the great stoppage, and, like all the other lads, without the philosophy of his elders, he was more anxious to kick up his heels than to sit on them. Someone-and here is the hand of Providence-gave him, or lent him, a box of paints, and Griffiths, whose only other commis- sion had been from the postman for daubing a few caricatures, suddenly found a release for his energies. It is extraordinary, viewing his work now, to reflect that this lusty infant had never so much as kicked in the womb, but it is so. But now this cheap box of paints opened the gate of a new world. Walking over the fields, squatting beside a rickyard, Griffiths heard a voice, and in his own clumsy, inarticulate way, he tried to answer her. The next phase is the National Eisteddfod, when the best of these clumsy efforts were submitted, and we must imagine Sir Goscombe John, who was the judge, rubbing his eyes once or twice and suggesting that Swansea Art School was the only place for this exhibitor. An art school is a place where a young artist meets many other young men who have come to know the significance of Art. To all whom the heart beats for at twenty, we might say with Turgeneiff's line in mind, but Griffiths seems to have talked less about Art than anyone, to have been independent to the point of moroseness, and to have made up his mind not to be taught. But however morose, however rebellious, it could not prevent his work being of sufficient worth to gain a four years' scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London. And at the cost of family sacri- fices, which Griffiths never fails to remember, the erstwhile miner set forth for the metropolis. A strange, fantastic city it seemed to this modern pilgrim-a Vanity Fair where, on every booth, was Art. But this Art was not the Art he felt the art he knew was very much closer to him, was indeed so much a part of his life that he preferred to speak of Life than Art, and to let his mind dwell on the sombre and desolate mountains of his home the grim out-works of Industry the fine shouting life that he loved transfixed on this awful gibbet. It was about this time that I met him. Stand- ing before a picture, Preaching in the Mines," with the haggard, luminous head of an old miner looking upward, his mates gathered round-a student's picture one might say, but a picture so strangely moving that I felt there and then that a new voice had come to proclaim the agony and sublimity of the Celtic soul. If we were not reared upon the self-same hill, from then onwards we contrived to present a united front to the world, sharing our thoughts and aspirations, talking interminably about Art as we understood it those long preparatory years when we were hoisting our own petard (which was to be the Skull and Cross Bones), when for the hundredth time we would leave a Lyons tea-shop with the awful presumption of having judged the world and found -it wanting. One can afford to be funny in retrospect but the early life of an artist is perhaps only tolerable in musical comedy. And Griffiths stuck to his guns as he had always done. He never became a teacher, nor did he ever commercialize his work. It became more and more defiant. In time he competed for the Prix de Rome, which to the young people in South Kensington is Paradise, though the Valle Giulia is only such another South Kensington. He was one of the four finalists and his entry was as shattering as any the judges have had to consider. The Ex- pulsion from Eden,-and he submitted a Welsh mining village, a little cross with its poor jar of daffodils, a shrunken tree, the outworks of a pit and behind a strange, glowering sky .That the sky was instinct with drama-a strange brooding, other-worldiness such as he conveys again and again was not the point. The judges, we should imagine, were appalled, and Griffiths did not get the prize, though it was probably to his advantage that it was so. In Rome he would only have played truant for another three years. Shortly afterwards he won the Travelling Scholarship enabling him to spend some months abroad and he saw all there was to see with avidity. And so after leaving the Royal College of Art, Griffiths has continued along his own lines gradually strengthening his hand and drawing more and more on that inner knowledge which is the life of his work. El Greco was his first love as Van Gogh is his latest but he has been strangely free from influences. One might say that Wales is his enduring love. One hesitates to try and explain away his work or to apply to it any of the catch-phrases of crit- icism. One might call him a Romantic (since Emotion is the phrase most often on his lips) but then one may call him a Realist (according to another definition) with almost as much truth.