The Morgan Hopkin Gallery presents work from four generations of one family. Llew E Morgan, through his own art, inspired his family and descendents to create art and literature from a love of their country. Original paintings, prints and books all available from www.morganhopkin.co.uk

Llew E Morgan was a renaissance man, an innovator in education and photography, the latter a hobby which brought him national recognition. He was the winner of fourteen ‘Firsts’ for his photography at the National Eisteddfod of Wales from his first entry in Treorchy in 1928.

Llew was born in 1885 in Tirwaun, a hamlet outside Ystradgynlais in the Swansea Valley. At the age of ten he was given a camera by his grandmother, a present for passing the scholarship to the local grammar school, and this began a lifelong obsession with photography.

After two near-death experiences as a teenager in the colliery, Llew’s parents encouraged him to try for a university place. He succeeded, and chose Exeter where he excelled at chemistry, biology and no less at rugby. He returned home to marry Blodwen, his long-time sweetheart, who was happy to leave the valley for the more affluent Oxford when Llew was offered a teaching post there. However, the Oxfordshire countryside did not give him the joy he felt when he walked the Brecon Beacons and the Gower peninsular and this hiraeth for Wales brought the family back to Ystradgynlais in 1925.

Llew began teaching in Ynyscedwyn School and spent his evenings writing articles for the local paper , Y Llais , on his skills as a gardener and rearer of chickens, ducks, geese and pigs.

Each article was accompanied by notes from Blodwen on preserving, pickling and cooking the bountiful harvest of their plot. It read like the Good Life but most miners were excellent gardeners and with houses built on the roadside, working class Welsh houses had extremely long gardens with plenty of potential.

Newspapers began to run photographic competitions and Llew became a regular winner with his unique-angle snaps and comic scenes of children at play. Daughter Betty and her friends were always ready to pile into the Ford and enjoy an outing to the seaside with Blodwen supplying a generous picnic.

Llew’s main focus was nature and landscape and he would spend hours in the remote areas of Brecon and Radnor waiting for a Peregrine Falcon to emerge from its nest or a fox to appear at its lair. These two images were his initial prizes at the National Eisteddfod. Hours after supper would be spent in his darkroom, developing and printing the photographs to his very high standards.

During WW2, while still teaching full-time, Llew became an Adviser to the Ministry of Agriculture. Evenings were now spent making slides of pertinent livestock, even making clay models of the innards of rabbits showing how disease can affect an animal, so that he could lecture to communities on how to ‘dig for victory’. His trusty Ford took him often as far as Aberystwyth, almost a three hour journey in those days, to lecture for a few hours and then drive home by the early hours to grab some sleep before leaving for school. These years also saw him as Air Raid Warden as German bombers would fly up the valley after their assault on Swansea, dropping bombs as they made their way back to the Continent.

Llew’s images live on at the St. Fagin’s Museum, Cardiff, through the biography, Full Circle, and through the family archive and website.

Llew's daughter, Betty, had watched her father compose his photographs and had inherited his talent for composition and the same interest in the documentary element in art. When she began to paint it was the story behind the subject which she wished to express. Wartime in Cardiff brought her home to Ystradgynlais. She was now married to the architect, Howel Hopkin, whose father, Will, was the proprietor of the newspaper, The West Wales Observer. Her idea was to train as an interior decorator and to work with Howel in designing ‘ideal’ homes, but motherhood took over and with three children to care for her artistic aspirations were put on hold. She did, however, write children’s stories and continued to draw, encouraging the children in both art forms.

In the 1970s she began to paint pictures depicting life in the valley during her childhood – the carnivals, eisteddfods, Whitsun parades, cinema queues and domestic scenes such as ‘Pig Killing’, ‘Dadcu’s Funeral’, and community events like the 1936 ‘Coronation Street Party’. Betty, now signing herself Elizabeth Hopkin, took sample paintings to the Portal Gallery in Bond Street, and was immediately accepted as one of their stable of artists by the owner, Eric Lister. He was enthralled by her imaginative colours and poetic expression and later wrote in his book on British Naïve and Primitive Artists:

Her paintings are a chronicle of life within the Welsh valley community seen through the eyes of an innocent child, but executed with the formal composition of an adult.

For twenty years Elizabeth exhibited successfully at the Portal, then at galleries across America and now shows exclusively at the Albany Gallery in Cardiff. She was encouraged by Tom Maschler, then head of Jonathan Cape publishers, to write a book on the stories behind her paintings. This she did in Then the Sirens Sounded followed by Butterflies of the Valley . Both books show how life changed from the rural idyll of the very early 1900s to the mining community of the 1950s.

What Eric Lister and collectors have loved is the humour that is expressed in her work. A typical series of paintings is of Dai Romantic, a miner, who stops to pick wild roses for his wife as he walks home from a shift with his companions, and who paints their terrace house pink which pleases his wife but shocks the neighbours.

Elizabeth painted an era long-gone but never to be forgotten. Her three daughters are all artistic, though Wendy was drawn to the sciences, while Mary followed her love of music, and Carole pursued acting, writing and painting.

Trained at Cardiff College of Art and with an M.A. in Literature from Cardiff University, Carole has travelled widely always carrying with her a sketchbook and notebook. After appearing in The Mousetrap, Dr. Who , and several television dramas she moved to New York and spent five happy years working at the British Trade Office.

On weekends she painted and had her first American Exhibition in Greenwich, Connecticut. A feature on her work in Vogue magazine advertised her talent for portraits of homes and gardens and this set off a chain of commissions from L.A., Palm Beach, and ultimately to portray the home of Ambassador and Mrs. Biddle-Duke in New York.

Family circumstances brought her back to Wales and she began to teach Art and Creative Writing for the University of Wales, Swansea. She became an Associate Tutor in Cultural Studies and now lectures on Llew’s life and work, her mother’s paintings, and the work of Josef Herman, the Polish artist who settled in Ystradgynlais from 1944 to 1955 and became a close family friend.

Carole is a Trustee of the Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru and also of the Llangiwg Community Association having helped save the ancient parish church of Llangiwg high on the hills above the town of Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley.

After writing, Full Circle, the life of her grandfather, Carole set up Merton Press and published her novel, The Sensualist , three autobiographies illustrated with her paintings – French Adventures, Beatles, Before and Beyond and Aaaah America . This year she wrote and illustrated her first collection of prose-poems in Fantasia.

Creativity runs in everyone’s blood but only with encouragement and inspiration will it flourish. The family website is run by Carole’s niece, Jessica Lee Morgan, who follows her mother’s love of music and singing. As well as work by Llew, Elizabeth and Carole, the website includes drawings and paintings by Mary Hopkin and photographs by her son Morgan Visconti.

Original paintings, prints and books all available from www.morganhopkin.co.uk