On Friday, the new exhibition by father and son artists Aneurin and Meirion Jones, New Paintings, is being officially opened at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery. Both are firmly established as leading figures in contemporary Welsh art and both present a strong Welsh identity in their work.

Aneurin says: “The type of countrymen who have peopled my work for the last half century have become scarce. The physically strong, rural philosopher still exists, but is very much the exception in the rapidly changing rural community.

“I was brought up in the hill farming area of The Black Mountains on the borders of the old counties of Brecon and Carmarthen, a physically demanding place where the divide between the ‘real’ world and the mythological world was ambiguous. The people I knew were eccentric individuals who weren’t bothered by the clock, but who enjoyed storytelling, especially of the supernatural, and they were poets, they had wonderful singing voices, and had deep ancestral bonds with the red soil of that part of Wales.

“As I paint the last of that generation, I simultaneously delve into personal memories, the past and present merge giving the paintings a dreamlike quality coming from a world which probably only exists in my imagination.”

Meirion says: “The work in this exhibition was done during the last year or so. The starting points of the paintings are invariably something or someone glimpsed whilst travelling around the parts of West Wales, which are familiar to me. There is just something about the field patterns, the play of light on the sea, the relation between two colours, which sparks something that asks to be developed. It doesn’t matter whether it is the sea of the hills, figurative or not, just as long as there is a spark which ignites what Van Gogh called ‘the driving force’.”

This sales exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, July 1, and runs until Sunday, August 13.