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BERT ISAAC
BERT ISAAC
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Bert Isaac: The Dorothea
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Bert Isaac, Welsh Painter and Printmaker
Featured artist for the Contemporary Welsh Printmakers Exhibition in Pakistan 2007
Bert Isaac died last year and we have asked his widow Joan, also an artist, for permission to include his work in our exhibition as he was one of the most prolific, skilled and adventurous printmakers to emerge in Wales. He was an enormously productive artist, and he continued working every day when possible, right up to his death at the age of 83, creating during his last year some of his finest and most powerful large works on paper, using watercolour, acrylic inks and crayons. As a printmaker he had a never-ending stream of ideas for new works. His tendency when working on his large linocuts and woodcuts was to move from one block to the next with scarcely a pause. This meant that he seldom printed a full edition. Many of his prints exist in only one or two copies or at most a handful. Happily the lino blocks are still stored in the house in Abergavenny, South Wales where he spent the last two decades of his life, and one day it may well be possible to edition some of these works - though sadly they will not be signed by the artist himself.
Bert was born in Cardiff in 1923, and studied at the local College of Art. As a student teacher at Cardiff College he worked alongside Ceri Richards, an artist who is now seen as perhaps the leading figure in Welsh Modernism. Significantly, Richards was also an enthusiastic printmaker, and he and the English Neo-Romantics were undoubtedly crucial in helping shape Isaac's early approach to both painting and printmaking.
Neo-Romanticism has been described by the art critic Peter Wakelin as "that particularly British combination of Romantic landscape and concern for nature with innovations from Cubism and Surrealism". From the careful drawing of Neo-Romanticism Bert Isaac moved on to a much more fluid expressionism, which, in his last years, took on an abstract quality reminiscent of some Chinese landscape art - a flurry of mark making dependent on intuitive feeling rather than intellectual control. He was attracted to landscapes in which wild nature was wresting back control from the handiwork of humans, and over several decades he drew much of his inspiration from flooded slate quarries in North Wales where work-sheds were perched on top of steeply carved cliffs and flooded deeps. His love for the Welsh landscape is evident in his portfolio of prints, 'The Landscape Within' published in 1991 by the Old Stile Press in Wales. In this portfolio he returns, in Peter Wakelin's words, to a deeply Neo-Romantic philosophy "related to nature and place, the expression of emotion in landscape, and the Modernist approach to serendipity in technique."
Bert Isaac spent many years teaching outside Wales and eventually joined the Art and Design Department of the Institute of Education at London University where he worked until his return to Wales in the 1980s. Throughout his years in England he returned regularly to the Dorothea Slate Quarry in North Wales to sit in contemplation - filling his mind with images which he would work on later, at home, in the peace of his studio.
ROBERT MACDONALD
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