Maverick Gwent artist Mark Williams is exhibiting in Cardiff. Mike Buckingham talks about his work and asks when he will return to his native county.

He as been billed as the most promising artist Newport never had - and now the exile has just opened an exhibition in Cardiff.

Despite handsome sales and favourable reviews Mark Williams, whose exhibition together with Barry Lewis runs at the Bute Space Gallery in Cardiff Bay until April 1 the artist has never received the recognition in his native Gwent to which many feel him entitled.

Now 47 - thus qualifying for the title of the angry middle-aged man of South Wales Art - Mark Williams was born at Cwmbran and went to Newport Art College in the mid-1980s - an experience he says, which almost put him off art for life.

During the 90s he began to develop a style which is immediately recognisable and which - Gwent apart - galleries were anxious to show.

Mark Williams says the exception to this is the GPF Gallery owned by Janet Martin where a show four years ago yielded good sales and it looked for a while as if both the gallery and artist might crack the problem of Gwent 's apparent inability to get itself noticed on the wider stage.

"The odd thing is that I love Gwent.

"My first work was inspired by it and it is somewhere I shall always return" he said on the eve of his Cardiff opening show.

"Yet it remains a fact that if anyone wants to get noticed they have to have an exhibition in Cardiff."

Mark Williams's hall marks are strongly delineated pictures which at the same time as rendering manufactured objects such as cars, boats, the Transporter Bridge and street furniture with technical accuracy at the same time as managing to work them into a natural landscape.

Thus, when Williams paints for instance, a wrecked car abandoned by the side of the Usk with the Transporter Bridge in the background, all seem part of a harmonious whole.

The man-made objects, presently dominant in the landscape will given the fullness of time, be reclaimed by nature.

The first thing to strike the viewer though, is his wholly original use of colour.

Mark Williams has replaced the misty greys and subfuse browns of Uskside scenes for the hot colours of Mediterranean light.

He is especially fond of colours at the warm end of the palette - oranges, ochres, red, yellow and greens and counterpointing them with blues which, although normally regarded as a cold hue, complement the bright colours.

In some of his more experimental work Mark Williams has abolished shadow, a technique which gives everyday subjects a strange, unearthly feel.

Bute Space Gallery is owned by Rachel Biddulph. The pictures Mark Williams has chosen to show have a maritime theme which is a fairly new departure, although the artist has long been fascinated by rivers, the Usk in particular.

A centrepiece of the present show is the Waverley paddle-steamer docked at Penarth Pier.

Although originally designed for Clyde trips the Waverley has made so many visits to Newport as to be a part of the backdrop to the city, so to that extent Mark Williams is on familiar ground, or rather water.

Those who see it report a feeling of experiencing something that comes from a time just before our own when they see the paddle-steamer docked at the old Victorian pier and Mark Williams manages to capture this feeling with its barely discernible edge of eeriness.

A Newport exhibition is, the artists says, planned for the summer.

Many who treasure his oil paintings and are appreciative of his work think this is not before time.

Bute Space Gallery www.butespace.com 02920 482565 for more details.