Description
Ifor Pritchard (1940 – 2010) – Splitting the Block (Hollti’r Bloc)
For sale is a very rare painting by the Welsh artist Ifor Pritchard, very few of his pieces ever come to the market. As far as we are aware this is the only piece currently available in the world.
Oil on canvas – This painting features in the book on Iford Pritchard’s work – Craig yr Oesoedd / True Grit
Signed bottom right
Painting Size : 16 x 20″ Inches – Framed Size 19.5 x 23.5″ Inches
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Ifor Pritchard (1940 – 2010)
Ifor was a Welsh painter and art teacher whose late work turned the slate quarries of the Nantlle Valley into thick, remembered portraits of labour, chapel and community.
Born in Carmel, Gwynedd, a village almost wholly dependent on the Dyffryn Nantlle quarries. He began painting as a child during the Second World War, mainly steam trains.
Those early pictures were shown at the Science Museum in Manchester and the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and in the late 1980s he won an international competition run by Crewe Works.
He trained as a teacher and spent most of his career in the art department at Ysgol Syr Hugh Owen, Caernarfon, retiring in 1992. Outside the studio he was a noted amateur goalkeeper, playing for Porthmadog and the Welsh amateur side after moving to the town in the late 1960s.
Illness stopped him painting in 1992. He returned in 2003 with a different subject: the quarrymen, managers, horses and machines of his childhood, figures he remembered and imagined rather than observed on site.
Working in oil with a heavy impasto, he built faces and rock faces from blocks of colour, often edged in black, and kept to a narrow range of blues, greys and purples. Brighter reds and oranges appeared when he painted the quarrymen’s brass band. He said his interest was only the human side of the industry: a claustrophobic life built around the quarry and the chapel. “I have slate, but not the dust, in my veins.”
He first showed this body of work at Glynllifon, near Caernarfon, around 2006–07 (about thirty paintings), and at his peak exhibited sixty pieces at Oriel Ynys Môn, Anglesey, in June 2009. He died in Porthmadog on 9 October 2010, aged 70, after a short illness. The bilingual book Craig yr Oesoedd / True Grit (Myrddin ap Dafydd, Carreg Gwalch, 2011) surveys some of his best paintings.
