The genius of Dai Greatcoat

How many people who gaze up at the magnificent lettering on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre think of the great painter-poet David Jones? I guess not many. In fact they all should, as the lettering is based upon the unique and wonderful 'inscriptions': those "words painted on paper" (Peter Levi, The Times) that Jones produced late in his career (see illustration, Exiit Edictum, 1949, Tate Gallery).

Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, in 1895 to a Welsh father and an English mother (whose own father was Italian). This Welsh-Cockney heritage served Jones well, and can be seen in his 1937 poem-cum-memoir of his time in the trenches In Parenthesis, which was much admired by T.S.Eliot.

Unable to get into the Artists' Rifles, Jones enlisted in the Welch fusiliers on the 2nd January 1915. Wounded in 1916 and invalided home, he missed the carnage of the Passchendaele offensive by a few weeks. Jones, like Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, found great companionship and humanity in the company of regular soldiers during the Great War: as his Times obituary states, the "comradeship of his section, platoon, and company had a value for him apart from anything that came later". Whereas for Gurney the war crippled him mentally, for Jones it was as much a "flaming light as a shadow" (Times). As Peter Levi states "The fulcrum of his morality was the decency of the infantrymen of 1914".

A painter of ethereal beauty and an engraver of powerful simplicity (see his Ancient Mariner series at High Cross House, for instance) Jones was a unique artist, almost a twentieth century Blake in the strength of his religious and artistic scope and vision. Although playing apprentice to Eric Gill in the early years, and following Gill's artist's colony from Ditchling to Capel-y-Ffin (and having been briefly engaged to Gills's daughter Petra), Jones ' style was less rooted in the medieval than Gill's. Gill presented himself, and was, a craftsman, producing most of his public work to commission, and his private work mostly concerned with his twin passions of Roman Catholicism and sex. Jones created from his imagination, drawing on myth & folklore, personal experience and a fine sense of light and colour to produce multi-layered modern works of art, such as the sublime Aphrodite in Aulis of 1941.

Sources

Levi, Peter, (2006) ‘Jones, (Walter) David Michael (1895–1974)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press; online edn, May 2006

Rothenstein, John (1956) Modern English Painters: volune II. Lewis to Moore. Macdonald and Janes, London.