the party’s over

Photograph courtesy of Bernard Mitchell

Tomorrow at close of day, my sixtieth birthday retrospective exhibition at the National Library of Wales comes to the end of its three month run. It has been an extraordinary summer. People have poured through the gallery and through Ty Isaf. Friends and family have travelled far to be with us and to see the exhibition. The Gregynog Gallery visitor book is crammed with comments that shall stay with me for my lifetime. I met the friends that until now had been enjoyed only at an e-mail distance. Dave Bonta and Marly Youmans arrived from Pennsylvania and New York State, and coming face to face them was a wonderful though oddly familiar experience, because of course, they were both as I had known they would be, utterly marvellous people. Anita Mills and Andrea Selch arrived from N Carolina (old hands at the trip because together and separately they have made it a good few times now) and by the 6th May Ty Isaf was in the state of high energy you’d expect from such a gathering of creative, buzzed-up American poets and writers waiting for the party to begin. We had the most fun with them, and when we set set out in convoy for the National Library on the afternoon of the exhibition opening, I felt as though I had my gang to protect me. Liz and Graham Sangster… friends back from my days as a stage designer when Liz was the head of the scenic department at Welsh National Opera… arrived from France, and together with Eric and Angharad Roberts (opera singer  and stage designer respectively) made their base just down the coast at our cottage. (Angharad’s and Eric’s Jack Russell terrier Moli came too, as did Moli’s daughter from a litter fathered by our own Jacket!) Hotels and guest-houses around Aberystwyth were full of friends for who we had no room at Ty Isaf, and Anne and Basil Wolf generously offered overflow accommodation so no-one had to sleep in a tent on our lawn.

Throughout the three months of the exhibition visitors have continued to come. Every week our guest rooms have been almost permanently occupied. Yesterday our friend Pete Goodridge, art carrier, curator and all-round star, arrived with his wife Mel to see the show. (Pete safely transports my work around country and indeed the globe.) Friends Gareth and Kate came too, a treat as we’d thought they wouldn’t make it because Gareth’s job as a television and radio journalist keeps him travelling. I’ve given tours and talks at the gallery and have been staggered by the number of people who have sought me out to tell me about what my work means to them. There have been the e-mails and letters too, many of which I have yet to answer. It’s been rather overwhelming.

It will take me a while to make sense of all that has happened and to get some kind of perspective on it. So many contributed to make the exhibition and the publications everything that we had hoped for and more. I’m agog with admiration for the chief architects of what has been achieved. Andrew Wakelin was tireless and heroic throughout the process of designing the books. We asked much of him, and he gave us so much more. Most of the team have been thanked in person or in public, some in writing, and some even here on the Artlog.

But of course there is one without who none of it would have happened. He bore the worst of my insecurities in the run-up to the show, endured my rants and occasional rages and held fast to the tiller when the waters we negotiated were turbulent and my emotional states matched them. So please raise a cheer for my partner, friend and hero, APW.

Thank you Peter. Just like you said you would, you made it all happen.