“Tir y Blaenau”, David Jones, 1924/25, The National Library of Wales.
In December 1924, David Jones spent Christmas in Wales at Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains. Eric Gill had moved into what was a former Benedictine monastery in a location which even today is fairly remote. It was freezing cold and at dinner they all had to wear overcoats and wooden shawls, but Jones was enchanted by the place. He loved everything there from the family cat, the farm animals and the play of light in a landscape with high mountains rising steeply over deep valleys. For Jones, the landscape bore the vestiges of ancient times, of Arthurian myths and most importantly, the Creator. He loved the wild ponies and included them often in the landscapes he painted during his stay at Capel. Often, they are the only animals to be seen. Thomas Dilworth writes, “He loved the majestic irregular landscape. Small wild ponies grazing on the slopes seemed to him suspended there, and from the hill opposite appeared larger than life.” Jones had a profound sense of our createdness and of what he called the “intimate creatureliness of things…an appreciation of the particular genius of places, men, trees, animals.” One thinks of other visionary figures such as Thomas Merton, who wrote “a tree gives glory to God by being a tree”, or Hopkins’ “inscape”, and the concluding line of his “Pied Beauty”: “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.” The place Jesus takes his disciples in today’s gospel passage is described as “lonely”, but the word can also be translated as desert or wilderness with all the associations that implies. It probably meant the kind of terrain which in our time would be designated as a national park; a place where the natural world seems largely unspoiled. This encounter with the remote landscape of the Black Mountains had a powerful impact on Jones and on his development as an artist. Here he found his own style of painting: lines became thinner, freer and boundaries more fluid, as he sought to reflect something of the beauty, not just of the landscape, but of God the Creator, by the placing line and pigment on a sheet of paper.
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