Sir Kyffin Williams

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2001

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the Welsh painter, Sir Kyffin Williams. It was only when he was invalided out of the army because of his epilepsy that Kyffin decided to paint. "You are not normal. You should do art" was one doctor's verdict. Since then, no artist has done more to portray the brooding, mountainous landscape of North Wales.

He chooses eight records to take with him to the mythical island.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Germinal by Emile Zola Luxury: A small painting called the Head of a Girl by Michael Schwerz

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My car soo's way this week is a painter. His work is an evocation of his love of Wales, the country in which he was born and where at the age of 83 he now lives and works. He didn't plan to become an artist. When he was
0:44.8	invalided out of the army with epilepsy, a doctor told him he should try something
0:49.2	that didn't tax his brain and suggested art. He went to the Slade and then took up teaching in a
0:55.2	London school where he stayed for nearly 30 years. Always painting at least two
1:00.2	pictures a week he gradually established a reputation that allowed him to return home and live entirely by painting.
1:07.0	Now, much honored and admired, he's a man of tradition, deeply contemptuous of the modern art establishment.
1:14.8	People don't paint for love anymore, he says.
1:17.6	They paint for fame to shock and for money.
1:20.7	He is Sir Cuffin Williams. You've certainly not sought fame or money. He is Sir Cuffin Williams. You've certainly not sought fame or money over the years
1:26.2	Cuffin, although they've now come your way. Has that love of painting or the love of
1:31.2	what you paint been enough to sustain you all these years?
1:35.0	It has. I haven't ever tried to be famous or anything like that because that's rather
1:42.3	stupid because one way of not been famous I think I just I
1:46.6	love the landscape where I live and my ancestors have lived there from time in memorial
1:50.9	so it was natural for me just to paint the landscape and the people.
1:55.4	And yet you spent 30 years away from it as I say teaching in a London school.
2:00.1	You must have held the visual memory of that landscape with you.
2:04.0	I've got a very good memory and every holiday I used to come back to Wales and I used to do
2:09.2	lots and lots of drawing and painting and then I had to go back to London and there in my small room in London I can make it
2:16.4	populated with farmers and sheepdogs and mountains and heavenly as well.
	...

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