Kyffin Williams' Welsh Landscapes Get the Immersive Treatment

By Daniel Okafor

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth opens a free immersive show on Wednesday 18 November built around Sir Kyffin Williams, the palette-knife painter who made Welsh landscape painting his own. It runs for three to five years, and only ten people enter at a time.

Williams, who died in 2006, applied paint in thick layers with a palette knife (a flat blade tool that produces bold, textured strokes). Van Gogh, Cézanne and Hockney have already had the all-singing, all-dancing projection treatment. Now it is Wales's turn, at a deliberately smaller scale and a much more intimate one.

Hundreds of Williams's pictures held in the library's store have been animated and set to music. His farmers and sheepdogs walk through rugged landscapes. His waves appear to crash around the exhibition space. Dark grey mountains spring up as a sun drops into the sea.

What does the show contain?

Profiad Kyffin is bilingual and staged in three rooms near one of the library's main doors, with views over the town and the sea. In the first room, the singer Sir Bryn Terfel — himself an avid collector of Williams's work — introduces the artist's story. In the second, landscapes, seascapes and blocks of colour swirl across walls, floor and ceilings to the sound of a Welsh chamber-folk string trio. The third room holds an electronic version of a Williams self-portrait that visitors can touch to sense the thickness of his paint; the moustache is especially dense.

How did the library end up with the work?

The connection dates to 1950, when the library bought an oil painting of Cadair Idris, the beloved Welsh mountain, from Williams for £15, while he was teaching art in London. That canvas would be worth tens of thousands of pounds now.

After Williams moved back to Ynys Môn (Anglesey) in north Wales, he visited often. Morfudd Bevan, the library's art curator, said: "Someone would call 'Kyffin's here!' and people would go down and have a cup of tea with him."

On his death, Williams left his estate to the library, making it the largest holder of his work in the world: 200 oil paintings, 300 original prints and more than 1,000 pieces on paper. Normally they sit in a storeroom in the bowels of the building, viewable by appointment or brought up to the reading room, where easels display them. Visitors can also examine his palette, his paint-spattered phone and the boots he used to stride around the hills and valleys.

Why animate a painter known for texture?

Bevan said a key aim was bringing Williams and the library to new audiences, including younger people. "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, meaning something like homesickness for a place that no longer exists or perhaps never did.

Dennis Outten, chief executive of Focal Studios, the show's main designers, said the challenge was projecting the landscapes without losing Williams's texture. His team spent months living with the paintings from the stores, working out how to convey the bold palette-knife work.

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

There were delicate decisions: how a Williams farmer should walk, and exactly which colours to use as his sun set into the sea. Outten believes the artist would have enjoyed the show's playful feel. "He was a cheeky chap, an amazing raconteur and an educator. We think he would have liked our approach."

Advance booking is recommended; whether intimacy proves a stronger draw than spectacle is the experiment the library has just funded for half a decade.