LLanmadoc

Rhossili

We were going to discuss a project on art, landscape and memory.

We arranged to make an early start and head for the Gower. The rest was up to the weather. A superb Ocotber's day meant that nothing short of a full route beyond Llanmadoc Hill to Rhossilli would do.

Hence- park car up at Bury Green just as the big white Pullman scooped the kids up for school, detour to see the fort near Fairy Hill, and thence Ryers Down, Llanmadoc Hill, Llangennith, Rhossili - the bottom route just above the beach, Rhossili and around the head alongside Worms Head and on to Fall Bay, Rhossili and lunch stop in pub, then Rhossili Down, LLangenith - and another pub stop as the sun was so insistent upon a beverage; the Pullman now dropping off the kids - and to make life easier the direct route along the road back to Bury Green.

Once I was home I recalled a connection between Cedric Morris - who painted Llanmadoc Hill - and East Anglia, where he set up his East Anglia School of Painting (-including Lucian Freud amongst his students):

"In 1937 Morris and Haines, with hardly any qualifications for doing so, opened the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at nearby Dedham in Essex. By the close of its first season, its pupils had grown in number from one to sixty, and the future of this unorthodox establishment was assured. Even the catastrophic burning-down of the original premises in 1939 proved only a temporary setback: the school, and Morris and Haines with it, moved the next year to Benton End, a Georgian mansion with a sixteenth-century core, set in acres of land on the edge of the Suffolk village of Hadleigh. At Dedham pupils had lodged in the village; at Benton End they lived in the house, joining in the lively dinners every evening, cooked and supervised by Haines, and dancing afterwards to gramophone records of Latin-American music. Instruction was often given outside, watched over by peacocks, cockatoos, cows and ducks, while gardeners wove their way around the easels - the garden itself, and especially Morris's collection of irises, soon became as well-known as the school. Pupils of all ages were admitted and encouraged, non-professional artists as well as those ambitious for a career in painting: among the latter were Lucian Freud, David Carr, Joan Warburton, Glyn Morgan and Maggi Hambling (...)" (x).

Morris hailed from the industrialist's family which gave the industrial suburb Morriston its name. A former student of Morris recalls his left leanings - for instance once a year Morris opened his gardens at Hadleigh, and some locals "would have been pained to learn that the admission fees went to Labour Party funds" (x).