TAKEN from the last line of 'Poem in October' by Dylan Thomas, '....in a years turning' is an appropriate title for the new exhibition by David Garfield and his Dutch partner Mies Rietveld. In his long acting career, David, who was born in Gorseinon, has been called upon to present the words of Dylan Thomas, and the work showing in this exhibition has all been completed in the past year.
David Garfield was born in Gorseinon in 1933, and claims that he didn't train to do anything. Short spells at Morley College, London, studying sculpture and at St. Martin's School of Art in London, studying interior design, merely proved that he didn't respond to structured formal training.
"My early work was very flash and explosive," said David, "influenced by Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning, but entirely without structure or merit. Then I gave up."
After a few years odd jobbing, he found himself working as a stage-hand at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. On an impulse, he decided to become an actor, and joined the company the following year. This was for the Centenary season, and he appeared with Paul Robeson, Sir Laurence Olivier, Dame Edith Evans, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Charles Laughton, and Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Diane Rigg.
A career in television followed, with major parts in Elizabeth R, Lorna Doone, Poldark, Onedin Line, Z Cars, The Saint and The Prisoner. He wrote his first play for television, 'Mickey Man', winning the Observer Award for the best new playwright of the year. Thereafter he concentrated more on writing than acting.
It wasn't until 1996 that he started painting again and, in semi-retirement, applied a stricter discipline to his work, using a technique in his pastel painting which involves hours of painstaking layering.
"I am now more interested in honed talent than a series of energetic disasters leavened by the occasional happy accident," said David.
Work in this exhibition includes depiction of parts of France and Pembrokeshire.
Mies Rietveld was born in Rotterdam and still lives there. She studied at the Academie Voor Beeldende Kunsten and took her degree in Fine Art and History of Art. She worked for 15 years in the education section of the Boymans van Beunigen Museum in Rotterdam, specialising in 17th century Dutch painting, before taking up a secondary teaching post in Art and Art History.
She has worked in most media - oil, watercolour, etching, but now concentrates mostly on acrylics and mixed media.
After years of painting the unrelenting flatness of the Dutch landscape with its low horizons and huge skies, Mies delights in the contrast of the Herefordshire landscape with its mixed crops of wheat and corn, linseed and rape seed. She marvels at the warmth of the red earth and the backdrop of its rolling hills.
David and Mies met on a painting holiday in Spain four years ago. They have been partners ever since, dividing their time between Ross on Wye and Rotterdam. This is their first exhibition together and it promises to be a real treat.
The exhibition at Art Matters, South Parade, Tenby, opens on Monday, April 29, and continues until May 18, Monday to Saturday, plus Bank Holiday Sunday, from 10 am to 5 pm. For further information, contact Art Matters on (01834) 843375.