Product Description

This is the first book dedicated to the four year collaboration between two major British artists, Eric Gill and David Jones, at Gill's artistic-religious community at Capel-y-Ffin, a remote disused monastery in the Black Mountains. There, during the nineteen twenties, Gill and Jones came under new influences and took new directions which led to some of their most outstanding work. Capel-y-Ffin had a profound religious influence on them too. It allowed Gill to develop his thinking on medieval Catholicism, and generally to carry out his alternative lifestyle. Jones' more orthodox faith was further strenghtened, and proved an important source of inspiration for perhaps the leading British poet-painter since Blake. Jonathan Miles' original study demonstrates powerfully the way locality can impinge on artistic sensibility, and how art and religion meet. His extensive research gives valuable insights in to the lives and work of these two great artists.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #204806 in Books
• Published on: 1995-02-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 172 pages

Customer Reviews

Gill and Jones themselves,could not have written it better
Readers familiar with the biography of Eric Gill by Fiona MacCarthy [Faber & Faber 1989] and with that on David Jones by Dr. Miles in collaberation with Derek Shiel ['The Maker Unmade' Seren Press 1995] should not be put off by the thought "I'll have read it all before," for this is a captivating study of a four year period spent in the now familiar Black Mountains; but this was 80 years ago when the sound of a horse and cart in the country lanes was rarely eclipsed by the drone of a motor car. Wales has been host to many different Communes down the years: religious, artistic, self sufficient - the Gill menage at the ruined monastery of Capel-y-Ffin was all of these.Anyone interested in why such ventures so often fail should read this book.It was a life of hard work, in Spartan circumstances, for both sexes, on a bitterly cold Welsh hillside. Romance is a tender flower that blooms in such places and so it was for the artist David Jones and the Gill's daughter Petra. In that four years it bloomed, it faded,and it died; the hiatus and trauma is there to see in Jones's Welsh landscapes. He was never again to live in the Land of his Fathers and was to remain a batchelor all his life. Accomplished research lies behind this study of two talented friends. The warmth of the author's admiration for David Jones - that little Musketeer with the horror of war in his face - and his lack of vitreol when it comes 'scandalous revelations' in the life of Eric Gill is so refreshing after half a century of iconoclastic smut-hunters hellbent on debunking our national heroes. In his Preface the editor J.P.Ward promises us a series of introductory books on writers, musicians and painters of the Borders, "written by specialists who write imaginatively and directly about what moves them." This book amply fulfils that aim. My only criticism is that this mouthwatering Preface is not helped by the inclusion of a list of the other forthcoming books in this the 'Borderlines Series' [In the good old days such lists were to be found at the back of books!]