Pete Telfer’s 40 minute documentary about my work, Painting Without a Safety Harness, is now temporarily available to view here. I’m greatly obliged to Pete, who has generously offered the film for free view until the beginning of March, after which time it will be available only via a Culture Colony subscription.
Photograph of the artist and his dog courtesy of Pete Telfer
Now for ‘the rant’! Given that the resource of documentary films about Welsh artists made by Pete Telfer results not from T.V. commissions but his own unbounded enthusiasm, the Cuture Colony subscription system helps to fund this crucial work. As the Commissioning Editors at BBC Wales have long shown an almost complete disinterest in the contemporary visual arts of their own country …the excellent Wales-dedicated arts magazine programme The Slate and its successor Double Yellow having long ago been shed and not replaced… it’s entirely down to the vision and dedication of Pete Telfer that the lives and works of a good many contemporary practitioners within Wales are being recorded by him and have been made available for viewing at Culture Colony. He’s a man of commendable vision and enterprise and the artists of Wales have much to thank him for. It seems to me that one day the mood will change, and at such time I find it heartening to think that when BBC Wales finds itself in need of footage of artists speaking and working in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it’s to Pete Telfer they will have to turn for the material. I hope he makes them pay through the nose for it!
