Paintings and Constructions

1930s – 1980s

from the Artist’s Estate

PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 27th October 6-8pm
The exhibition continues until Saturday 7th November

Alfred Janes was born in 1911 in the centre of Swansea, above his parent’s fruit and flower shop in Castle Street.  He was educated at the Swansea School of Arts and Crafts, where a portrait he made of fellow student Mervyn Levy (1914-1996) won him a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in 1931.

Despite the quality of the teaching at the Royal Academy Schools, Janes quickly became drawn towards the modernist work being shown in the nearby Cork Street galleries. He found the Royal Academy increasingly antiquated in its approach, and ultimately did not complete his course. Instead, he found himself learning and developing through the social and artistic circles he had become part of in London.

Among these were a group of bohemian friends from Swansea, including the poets Dylan Thomas, Charles Fisher, John Pritchard and Vernon Watkins, the composer Daniel Jones, and fellow artist Mervyn Levy. The group became known as the Kardomah Gang, named after the Kardomah Café in Castle Street, Swansea, where they had often met.

Throughout the 1930s, even after drifting away from the Academy, Janes remained closely connected to this circle. He lived in a series of London flats shared with other members of the Kardomah Gang, and the friendships and artistic discussions that surrounded him became an important part of his development as a painter.

Much of Janes’ early work centred on still lifes and portraits of his friends. In 1935, several of his works, including a portrait of Dylan Thomas, were selected by Augustus John and Cedric Morris for an exhibition of ‘young artists of merit’. The following year, Janes held his first one-man show at the Everyman Gallery in Hampstead.

In 1937, his work was included in an exhibition at the Mayor Gallery alongside artists such as Picasso, Braque, Derain and Utrillo. For Janes, who had become increasingly interested in the modernist movement outside the Royal Academy, the exhibition placed his work in the company of artists he greatly admired.

In 1936, Janes had returned to Swansea, where he began teaching part-time at the Swansea Art School. Teaching would become a lifelong part of his career. Alongside it, he continued to paint, maintaining the practice that would remain at the centre of his life.

When war broke out, however, Janes put painting on hold. Because of his poor eyesight, he was conscripted into the Pioneer Corps rather than the fighting forces. He was eventually stationed in Egypt, where he worked running a prisoner-of-war camp. While there, Janes learned Italian from a young prisoner, Dr Gianni Bernardini. The two formed a friendship that survived the war, and they remained close for the rest of their lives.

When Janes returned to Swansea after the war, he found a city profoundly changed by the bombing. Castle Street, the centre of his childhood and the meeting place of the Kardomah Gang, had been devastated. His former studio and the Kardomah Café had both been destroyed.

He also returned to a family life that the war had kept him from experiencing. While on leave during the war, Janes had married Mary Ross, but he had not met their son, Ross, until his return home. After years away, in an almost unrecognizable Swansea, and with a very different life before him now, Janes found returning to painting “hellishly difficult”.

In 1953 the Janes moved to Nicholaston Hall, a scenic farmhouse in Gower, Wales. A year later their daughter Hilly was born. While at Nicholaston Hall they often entertained and maintained their Swansea friendship as an active part of artistic life of Swansea. In fact, Kingsley Amis’ book That Uncertain Feeling was based on the crowd which the Janes moved about in.

In 1963, they moved to Dulwich Village after Alfred Janes was offered a part-time post teaching at Croydon College of Art.  He was to remain teaching on a part time basis until his 70’s.

THE EXHIBITION

This exhibition traces Janes’ work from the 1930s to the 1980s. All come from the artist’s estate. Janes’ work changed dramatically throughout his life, making it difficult to draw a single visual thread through its many forms. What can be traced across his work, however, is his motivation: a sustained commitment to the process of craft.

Janes described himself as ‘a maker of pictures rather than a painter’, a distinction that speaks to the way he understood his practice. For him, making was an act of research and discovery. That commitment to work and experimentation was also recognized by those who knew him. Dylan Thomas observed that, ‘after many Academy awards, and several paintings hung in London galleries’, Janes ‘returned to Swansea to work and experiment, which were synonymous’.

Reflecting in 1974, Janes wrote that many of his creations were born out of his love of “materials and tools and craft.” He described craft as ‘a constant’, while ‘Art is something that others get or do not get out of it—it is a variable’. In this distinction, Janes’ artistic humility is revealed and so too is the direction of his artistic attention; toward the act of making rather than a predetermined artistic outcome.

This exhibition brings together work spanning his lifetime, from meticulously executed still lifes, through his experimental modes of the late 1950s and 1960s, to works of the 1980s that repurposed paintings from the early and mid-1960s. Despite their differences, these works share an underlying impulse. Janes was less concerned with artistic production or self-expression than with the possibilities offered by materials, tools, procedures, and methods.

Janes’ early still life paintings, and occasionally his portraits too, were driven by a particular and very individual process. He spent months meticulously constructing these highly complex works, harmoniously balancing each element. His unusual technique involved outlining objects with linear incisions, then slightly blurring the lines to sharpen their focus. He later introduced a polygonal grid into the process, marking it onto the board before painting and then retracing and incising it into the finished work. This added complexity while reinforcing visual repetition and echo. It is interesting to note that he had also a lifelong passion for music, and for playing the piano.

In the ‘50s, while based in Gower, Janes turned to more experimental modes of working. Though very different in appearance, these paintings were still governed by the same instinct for structure, process and control. Janes broke up the surface of the image in a way that caused his subjects to become fragmented as well. His works appear dispersed and scattered, while their subjects remain recognisable. This approach was made possible through the use of non-drying media, such as olive oil and liquid paraffin, which kept the paint wet and workable as he meticulously built up and fragmented the surface.

After his 1963 move to London and working in his Dulwich studio, which occupied the former dining room of the house, he continued to approach painting through craft and experimentation. He devised his own ways of mixing paint and worked with new and unusual materials, including sand collected from Oxwich Bay, Perspex, glass, marbles and PVA paints. These experiments produced a series of modernist reliefs, alongside a return to portraiture and experiments with collage.

In the 1980’s James decided he’d had enough of paintings and instead began to work and repurpose his previous still life works. He did so intentionally and carefully, keeping elements of his earlier work visible.

Though the results changed considerably from one period to the next, throughout his career his commitment to craft and experimentation remained constant. It is through this commitment to process that we come to understand Janes: as a modest, curious, and deeply engaged artist, for whom making was always a form of inquiry.

Below is a selection of works that will be included in the exhibition

Photography credits: Vince Bevan and Peter Abrahams, by kind permission of the artist’s family.