Renowned author and former BBC arts and media correspondent JON GOWER is writing a biography of the Abertillery artist John Selway, which is due out early next year. Here he pays tribute to the extraordinary talent of the artist who died last week.

FOR more than six decades the Abertillery-based artist John Selway produced art of the highest order.

His paintings often seemed like news reports that had been painted rather than filmed.

So, in the striking series of big canvases of ‘The Stations of the Cross’ in St Michael’s Church in Abertillery we see the Middle East in flames and reel back from the horrors of apartheid, or witness again the brutal war in Sierra Leone and glimpse the ragged march of refugees.

Current affairs informed Selway’s work with the shock of the now.

He was nothing less than a visionary artist working in our time, a William Blake for the CNN generation.

The art critic and curator Ceri Thomas quite rightly lists Selway as one of ‘our great painters since 1945’ along with Charles Burton, Ernest Zobole and Kevin Sinnott.

These are all painters from the South Wales coalfield, although it would be hard to spot the usual clichés – the ‘insistent coal tips, terraced roofs, hilly clumps, rugby posts, rimed faces and tipsy buses as the inevitable landscape of their mindscape’.

You certainly did not come to Selway for Valleys’ scenes and landscapes.

He explained that, commuting by bus as a fifteen year old from Abertillery to art school he was quite literally in the dark. “I was going on the bus at half past seven in the morning to get to Newport for nine, so in the winter I wouldn’t ever see the Valleys in daylight,” he said.

Despite his talents Selway was very much under the radar of the current British art scene, not to mention the one before.

Which is a mystery, as David Hurn, Wales’s only Magnum agency photographer said: “It does seem to me that in Wales there are people who may just love their particular patch of land more than others, but it’s almost as if John in terms of international status has been self-destructive, he’s done everything to make sure he does not become an international figure.”

Simply put, Selway loved living in Wales.

“I liked being here, always have liked it, and am very loyal to the place,” he said.

“I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. In latter years it’s been a great sadness to see the decline but it’s beautiful here, we have lovely countryside. It’s better than the Wye Valley. To my mind, at least, that’s a railway-model concept of a valley - it’s so artificial.”

There’s little doubt that had Selway stayed in London, or even ventured to the United States that his standing would be higher.

He was already represented by a top London gallery when he started as a student at the Royal College of Art alongside artists such as David Hockney and R.B.Kitaj.

Fellow Royal College of Art student Brian Gardiner says: “John always seemed to me immensely successful. “Coming back to Wales harmed that. He had an exhibition opening once and an academic who opened it said something like, ‘all of his colleagues went off to LA while John came back to Abertillery’.

“John’s wife Alison put it another way. ‘An awful lot of John’s contemporaries went to LA but John chose to make his home in Abertillery’, she said. ‘Is there regret? Well, he got something else by being in Abertillery. He couldn’t live in London, he didn’t like the way the arty world deals with artists, he didn’t like the way he was spoken to after his agent died. It was too much of a business’.”

Selway’s invisibility is a source of vexation for those who know the calibre of his work.

Mr Hurn suggests that what can appear to be insecurity may in fact be a very Welsh thing. “It’s certainly a shame,” he added. “Maybe it’s to do with being a small country… Maybe the painters in Luxembourg face the same thing… but it does seem that we like to talk to each other about all sorts of arts but don’t actually do anything to promote them abroad, and so say that some of these people are really internationally good. And John Selway is top of that list.”

When the critic Peter Wakelin visited a major retrospective of Selway’s work at Newport Museum and Art Gallery he was in no doubt whatsoever as to their quality.

“Some of the paintings in this exhibition are masterpieces,” he said. “They are elusive, complex and often hard to read. Like one of his heroes, Dylan Thomas, Selway makes art that is mysterious, evasive, grandiloquent.

Many of his works have literary themes, inspired by the novels of Patrick White and Jean and poets such as Dylan Thomas.

Selway’s interest in Dylan Thomas goes way back and one of his best works ‘The Hunchback in the Park’ jockeys for position as the most colourful in the Newport Art Gallery.

Based on one of Thomas’s most famous poems, set in Swansea’s Cwmdonkin Park, it is full of rhyming images: ‘A small toy boat on a pond is echoed by a larger, white-sailed craft wafting across Swansea Bay’.

Like a jazz musician, Selway often took a theme and improvised on it, riffing with colour and panache. One thinks somehow of Charlie Parker, the saxophonists’ saxophonist whose brilliance was summed up in two lines by the Mersey Poet Roger McGough: ‘He breathed in air, he blew out light / Charlie Parker was my delight.’

Selway did something similar with light and colour and with the steady focussed breath of the painter, concentrating over his canvas.

Selway travelled widely, read extensively and appreciated art by putting in the hours foot-slogging around Europe’s galleries and museums.

He taught art, made art, even once burned his art in a great bonfire in the garden.

In an article in Planet magazine fellow artist and critic Osi Rhys Osmond summed up many of the Selway’s considerable qualities.

“These are beautiful paintings that deserve our full attention; they offer us a glimpse into an extraordinary world and into the workings of the mind that created that world”, he said.

Yet the creator of these extraordinary worlds was no precious Bohemian. Ask anyone who’s met him in The Pontlottyn pub in Abertillery, a favoured habitat where he sipped halves most days (he said he only drinks pints ‘by accident’).

The artist Iwan Bala, who taught alongside John in Carmarthen, accurately describes him as a very down-to-earth man.

He says: “Someone in a pub asks what he does and he will answer truthfully, hoping it will be misconstrued, so he can happily spend the rest of the afternoon recounting tales of house painting. It’s easier that way, there’s less explaining to do. With his leather jacket, chunky fingers adorned with even chunkier rings, he is not the epitome of the sensitive aesthete, and indeed it would not be a surprise to find a house painter’s van parked outside. It’s hard to imagine that this is a man who paints so lyrically, so precisely, and with such subtle colouration.”

The critic Peter Wakelin found much to enjoy in Selway’s work, not least an unflinching resolve to avoid the easy path.

He added: “The strength of his subjects is at odds with much that is weak in contemporary Welsh art; there are no easy views, crude statements or personal mythologies here.

“Every picture says something about passion, about community, the things that people do to one another, the ugly and the lovely sides of human nature.”

John Selway was his own man, the real thing, a deeply literate painter of quality, scope and verve, and an Abertillery man to boot, a man blessed with a vigilant imagination. Acutely alert to things: that’s what he was.