THE latest community news from Cardigan

Restoration talks

HISTORIAN Glen Johnson will be going underground with the second of his four talks on the restoration of Cardigan Castle tomorrow evening (Thursday).

Glen, who has been involved with the castle since he was a schoolboy in the 1980s, is focusing on the 12 years of restoration from 2003 when the castle came into public ownership to the opening of the restored site in 2015.

His first talk looked at the public campaign to save the castle, the tentative efforts to clear up the site and the personalities involved.

His second talk, tomorrow night at 7.30pm in the tower room in Castle Green House, will look at the archaeological finds as the castle began to reveal its secrets.

Glen is never without his camera and his years of taking pictures have paid off with a comprehensive archive.

The talks, which cost £2, are in advance of a new exhibition at the castle which will look at the 10-year restoration of the site using Glen’s archive photographs.

Artist

ACCLAIMED Cardigan artist Aneurin Jones, whose work captured a largely-vanished rural west Wales, has died at the age of 87.

Born into a farming family on the Brecon/Carmarthenshire border, he studed Fine Art at Swansea College of Art before becoming Head of Art at Ysgol y Preseli, Crymych, until 1966.

His outstanding services to Art in Wales were recognised by a Rotary Award in 1978 and in 1981 he won the main art prize at the National Eisteddfod of Wales, where he exhibited regularly.

In 2013 his painting of Welsh Cobs was presented to Prince Charles at the Royal Welsh Show.

His paintings famously dwelt on the old ways of life in the Welsh countryside - capturing characters and scenes now gone - and he compared his life to that of a farmer, saying: “An artist ploughs their own furrow.”

Close friend Geraint James, of Awen Teifi, said: “Aneurin was one of Wales’s more foremost artists of all time – he captured the past by the very nature of his paintings.

“A lot of his work is drawn from his earliest memories – his paintings are unique; they almost talk to you.”

Mr Jones, who had lived in Cardigan since the 1960s, shared a studio with his son, Meirion, himself a renowned artist.

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