Sir Kyffin Williams

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Cossaway this week is a painter. His work is an evocation of his love of Wales, the country in which he was born and where, at the age of eighty-three, he now lives and works. He didn't plan to become an artist. When he was invalided out of the army with epilepsy, a doctor told him he should try something that didn't tax his brain, and suggested art. He went to the Slade and then took up teaching in a London school, where he stayed for nearly thirty years. Always painting at least two pictures a week, he gradually established a reputation that allowed him to return home and live entirely by painting. Now much honoured and admired, he's a man of tradition, deeply contemptuous of the modern art establishment. People don't paint for love any more, he says. They paint for fame, to shock and for money. He is Sir Cuffyn Williams. You've certainly not sought fame or money over the years, Cuffyn, although they've now come your way. Has that love of painting, or the love of what you paint, been enough to sustain you all these years?

Sir Kyffin Williams1:35

It has.

Sir Kyffin Williams1:36

I haven't ever tried to be famous or anything like that because um that's rather stupid, because one way of not being famous, I think. I've just l I love the landscape where I live, and my ancestors have lived there from time immemorial, so it was natural for me just to paint the landscape and the people.

Presenter1:55

And yet you spent thirty years away from it, as I say, teaching in a London school.

Presenter2:00

You must have held the visual memory of that landscape with you.

Sir Kyffin Williams2:04

Oh, I've got a very good memory, and every holiday I used to come back to Wales. I used to do lots and lots of drawing and painting. Then I used to go back to London, and there, in my small room in London, I'd get make it populated with farmers and sheep dogs and mountains and heaven knows what.

Presenter2:20

And very dramatic they are too as well. I mean, it's not a sort of beautiful blue sky pastoral idyll, is it? It's it's it's big, strong, thick oils, dark, dark mountains.

Sir Kyffin Williams2:32

Well, my memory is of the average Welsh day of sort of low cloud, or sun coming through the cloud, and the shafts of light on a dark mountain side all very exciting and stimulating, really. And that's what I remembered in London. But quite violent, too.

Sir Kyffin Williams2:47

Perhaps it's the epilepsy or something, I don't know. Anyway, Van Gogh's paintings were slightly violent, and he was an epileptic as well. I do love the strong contrasts of dark and light. It stimulates me, as maybe a cigarette or a glass of whisky does to other people.

Presenter3:01

But you've said you've gone further than that. You said your some of your paintings are neurotic. What do you mean, Lucette?

Sir Kyffin Williams3:06

Well, it's all tied up with the nerves. I love the more neurotic painters. I love Gerrico, Tintoretto, and people like that. And well, in all romantic art, there is an underlying violence, a sort of dark clouds, blue-black skies, flashes of lightning. There's a wonderful painting of a horse in the National Gallery by Gerrico, of a horse standing frightened by lightning. Now, that's the sort of thing that stimulates me as well, something like that.

Presenter3:32

But there's also in yours an underlying melancholy, I think. Is it that sort of Welsh Celtic melancholy?

Sir Kyffin Williams3:38

Well, I think perhaps we do tend to be melancholic in Wales, whether it's a natural thing or is it the landscape or what? I don't know. But uh I am a melancholic, I suppose. I come of a line of melancholics on my mother's side.

Presenter3:49

It's all wonderful stuff anyway, and and yet you only became an artist by chance, as we shall hear. But let's pause there for your first record.

Sir Kyffin Williams3:58

Well, I love Chopin. I love the Northern composers, I suppose, but partly because they are more neurotic. Rachmaninoff, Chopin, those sharp staccato notes, they stimulate me. So Chopin is some some somebody I always love very much indeed.

Presenter5:13

Daniel Barrenboyne, playing part of Chopin's Nocturne Opus Nine, number two, in E flat major. Apparently, Cuffin Williams, not only can your painting be violent, but it they can also have violent effects on people.

Sir Kyffin Williams5:26

They seem to stir their emotions. I like to think they stir them the right way, but very often they stir them the wrong way. And one lady bought one of my paintings and she hung it up when she first got it out of its crate. And her husband was out working. And when he came back, he saw it for the first time. And he pulled out a revolver and shot himself dead. And another little old lady came from Blind Bathiniog to a show I had in Carnarvon a long, long time ago. And she fell in love with one painting. And she said, Oh, I must have that painting. Oh, how much is it? It was sixty two pounds. And she said, Oh, it's far too much. I couldn't possibly pay that. Oh, dear, dear, if I do like it. Oh, I love that painting. I'll buy it. And she pulled out her cheque book and her pen and she started writing and then she dropped down dead before she signed it.

Sir Kyffin Williams6:17

But she died happy.

Presenter6:20

And c certainly some of the portraits you've done,'cause you do also do portraits and you used to do commissions, I think, to keep body and soul together. I think some some wives have been known to walk out on on on portraits of their husbands, haven't they?

Sir Kyffin Williams6:32

It's a very odd thing. Wives don't like my portrait of their husbands, but husbands seem to like my portrait of their wives. But but my paintings are

Sir Kyffin Williams6:40

Women, um, they're not terribly, terribly sort of feminine because I use a pallet knife.

Presenter6:45

Complexion is r roughed up.

Sir Kyffin Williams6:48

Well, it's very difficult. It took me about twenty years to paint a girl's face properly, I think, because it's so difficult with a knife and a brush working together.

Presenter6:58

But you've you've said, uh Cuffyn, that you you wouldn't have painted if you hadn't been epileptic. Now, and I know the doctor said you're abnormal, therefore you ought to go and do something, doesn't tax the brain, so you paint. But it w seems to me to be more than that. You've said before now, a kind of grit in the oyster, as it were. Is that what it is? Is it it create a kind of

Presenter7:18

I don't know, a a strength of feeling that has to be channelled into creativity.

Sir Kyffin Williams7:22

Yes, I have a feeling there is that. It's um there's two types of painters really. There's the the Van Gogh type who did have the grain of sand in their oyster and it irritated them and they had to paint. Then you get another man like the nice old pussycat, Pierre Bonnard. Now all his tones are very, very close. The sign of a sort of neurotic painter is when the tones are wide apart. You get strong darks against lights. But in so much lovely French painting, where they're probably very well balanced, some of them, all the tones are very close and they murmur beautifully to you.

Presenter7:57

So you appreciate them just as much. It's just that too much.

Sir Kyffin Williams7:59

Oh yes, yes, I do, but I could never paint like that myself.

Presenter8:04

Tell me about your second record.

Sir Kyffin Williams8:05

Yeah.

Sir Kyffin Williams8:06

Now we come to Sir Balius's Finlandia. When I was at school in Shrewsbury, we ran a mission in the back streets of Liverpool, and I went there once, and on the Sunday morning we all went to Liverpool Cathedral and we sat in this magnificent sort of transept, and I remember this tremendous echoing sound.

Sir Kyffin Williams8:28

Hurstling round this great, huge red brick building.

Presenter9:31

The end of Sibelius Finlandia, played by David Hill on the organ of Winchester Cathedral. But memories for you, Cuffyn Williams, of Liverpool Cathedral. You were eighteen when you you had your first Grand Mal epileptic attack. It virtually put paid well it did put paid, didn't it, to your your army career in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, which must have been a dreadful blow, because it was all you ever wanted to do to be.

Sir Kyffin Williams9:54

Yes, I wanted to be a grizzly. I wanted to be in the army, but it had to be in the cavalry because I always loved horses. But uh we had enough money to go into the cavalry.

Presenter10:02

Of course the doctor who then told you you were abnormal um wasn't the first doctor to do you a disservice, was he? Because I think when you were ten years old you'd been rather cut about by a surgeon.

Sir Kyffin Williams10:15

Oh Lord, yes. When I was ten, I remember I went into hospital for an operation on tonsils and adenoids. It was a very social thing to do in those days. My son just had his tonsils out. People vied with each other. So I was sent into bang and have my tonsils out. And unfortunately, the surgeon had a heart attack in the middle of the operation. And instead of removing my tonsils and adenoids only, he removed my uvula and my soft palate as well. So that did something to me because I was supposed to be a very bright little boy at my preparatory school. I was supposed to get a scholarship like my brother to Shrewsbury. But when I came back after a couple of terms off, I think, I was stupid. I couldn't concentrate. There's no question about me getting a scholarship. I only got through the Josque Fu's Common Entrance Examination, assisted by the Vicar of Hollyhead. Whenever he assisted me, apparently those papers I failed in. But I lost certain faith in the Welsh Church over there. But they let me in, I think, to Shrewsbury School. And I must say, I was not exactly a success there.

Presenter11:16

And you're apparently quite lonely. You didn't have many friends.

Sir Kyffin Williams11:19

It's a very funny thing that.

Sir Kyffin Williams11:22

I didn't worry about being much on my own, because um I had relatives in the town. I used to go down and see two lovely old ladies. I used to wander round the countryside um in a top hat and morning coat look very daft.

Sir Kyffin Williams11:36

But I I like being on my own. I always have been. Even at home I used to go out alone with my small dog.

Sir Kyffin Williams11:43

In the fields.

Presenter11:44

You were enjoying, though, the landscape even then, were you? Was that part of the world?

Sir Kyffin Williams11:49

I used to go and sit on a hill in front of the house with my small dog when we were shooting rabbits, and I used to look at one of the most wonderful views in Wales, looking all down the coast of Wales to St David's Head in the distance and St Tidwell Islands to the west. It was just wonderful, but I didn't say, My God, that's wonderful. You don't do that sort of thing. It's sort of seeped in.

Sir Kyffin Williams12:11

Record number three.

Sir Kyffin Williams12:13

Now I love male voice choirs. I suppose all Welsh people do. And singing is very much part of it. In the army, I remember it used to be quite extraordinary. We'd have the men on parade on the barracks square and then we'd dismiss them. Instead of buzzing off back to their billets, they'd form into little groups, as in the Royal West Chuzelaires, putting their arms round each other's shoulders and they'd form one would sing a note and they'd all come in and then they'd sing.

Sir Kyffin Williams12:41

It was extremely interesting and they used to sing these things like Kalon Lam and Grahaviad and I got to know them then.

Presenter13:45

Guaha Diad. What does that mean, Guahadiad?

Sir Kyffin Williams13:47

Um invitation.

Presenter13:48

Invitation sung by the North Wales Mail Choirs, recorded in the Albert Hall, that was, in nineteen ninety four.

Presenter13:55

Can I suggest, Sir Coffin, that that the landscape offered you not just food for the soul, as it were, as a boy, but also perhaps it was a bit of an escape, because you were rather unloved at home, too, weren't you?

Sir Kyffin Williams14:07

Oh no, I was lovely at home.

Sir Kyffin Williams14:09

But uh not uh very emotionally, but I was looked after brilliantly.

Presenter14:15

You were well looked after, you were secure, you were provided for, but your mother

Presenter14:19

Really loved her firstborn, your elder brother, yes.

Sir Kyffin Williams14:21

She preferred him, like uh same with Van Gogh. Van Gogh's mother preferred her firstborn, and Vincent was a substitute, really, I believe.

Presenter14:29

But did she show you affection, or not out

Sir Kyffin Williams14:32

But she was obviously tremendously concerned. I was brought up to believe that if I did A, I'd fall down, break my neck, or if I did B, I'd get pneumonia and die. No, she was always desperately concerned about me, but the emotional side was not there. She couldn't do it.

Presenter14:47

But she'd apparently farmed you out early on, hadn't she?

Sir Kyffin Williams14:49

Well, when I was born, I don't know why, but um maybe she wasn't well, but I was sent to a farmer's wife to be nursed, and I came back to the family quite a bit later. I suppose there's a certain lack of bonding after that. I think bonding is the word now.

Presenter15:05

And she was she apparently didn't although she was Welsh, she didn't like the Welsh very much.

Sir Kyffin Williams15:10

No, it's the it's a sort of generation when it was not done to speak Welsh. And maybe we had a domestic in the house and the domestic was never allowed to speak Welsh in my presence or anything like that. But you understand it all. No, my my Welsh is terrible, but I'm a complete fraud. It's rather wonderful. I can go to the village and I meet somebody say, and I say, Mrs. Johns, which is how you feeling. Now that's the absolute winner, you see, because then she goes through all her complaints, quick mala, which is rheumatism. And for twenty minutes, she'll tell me what's wrong, so then she goes away and says, Oh, Mr. Webb speaks lovely Welsh. All I said is stachien taim la.

Presenter15:45

But did you ever did you draw paint as a boy, or or were you this I mean, I'm getting the picture of a rather withdrawn, self-contained person.

Sir Kyffin Williams15:53

Um, I didn't. I didn't really, but when I went to school I started doing a little bit in the art classes.

Presenter15:59

But did you ever paint your mother?

Sir Kyffin Williams16:01

Never know.

Presenter16:02

Why not?

Sir Kyffin Williams16:03

Um it's probably because I never paint the landscape from my house at home. There's an old saying in Welsh about the fox goes a long way to kill. Most of my landscapes are painted quite away f from the house. Um I haven't really painted many mabulations. Next piece of music.

Sir Kyffin Williams16:20

Well, when I was at the slate in Oxford, I heard that every month the National Gallery in London would remove one of their paintings from the slate mines in Bleinfest in Yog, where they were there for safekeeping, and bring them down to the National Gallery. And to show the picture of the month. Well, I heard that that month it was Rembrandt's Margareta Tripp. And so I took the train from Oxford and I went down to London, went to the National Gallery. There was this magnificent painting by Rembrandt of this old woman, Margareta Tripp. It was absolutely colossal. And I heard him make motion, and people started sitting on the floor. And I asked somebody what was going on. They said, oh, Mara Hess is coming to play Bach. Then this magnificent little woman came in. She was dressed in black. Her hair was black, tied up at a bun at the back. And she came in imperiously. She was terrific. She came down, sat the piano.

Sir Kyffin Williams17:12

And she played Jesus Joy of Man Desiring. And I've never forgotten that. It really sank in. I was a piece of emotional jelly bought with Margareta Tripp and Mara Hess. It was terrific.

Presenter18:19

Bach's Jeez You Joy of Man's Desiring, played by Myra Hess, and that was recorded in nineteen forty, a bit earlier than you heard her, I think, Cuffin Williams. You were about twenty three. You were at the Slade School of Fine Art. You'd moved it had moved up to Oxford, I think, during the

Sir Kyffin Williams18:33

Yes, it has joined with the Ruskin School of Art in in Oxford.

Presenter18:37

Were you an instant success? Were you a round peg in a round hole?

Sir Kyffin Williams18:42

I went for an interview with a professor and I thought I'd better do something. I did some watercolours, I saw a widgeon winging in over the mud flats, rather after Peter Scott. And the poor old professor, he rather whinged at looking at these, and he got a bit of a shock and he said, Well, Williams, you can come for a term and see how it goes. Well, after a term, I think he felt I might be rather useful, because I'd been in the army and lots of the pupils there were pretty sort of wild.

Presenter19:07

Not that he saw any great talent.

Sir Kyffin Williams19:09

Oh, Lord, no, you don't see any talent, no, but uh

Presenter19:11

How were you with the nudes?

Sir Kyffin Williams19:12

Well, I was hopeless. I mean, I remember one day he said, Oh, Williams, why do you make your news look like oak trees? You can't draw, you better see if you can paint. Well, when I went to paint, the sort of thick paint, or I made it thick, it sort of appealed to my sort of sensuous nature, and and I started painting. But I was never very good when I was at the slade.

Presenter19:34

So when did you decide that you really did want to paint seriously, if if you felt, if you had such a low opinion of yourself?

Sir Kyffin Williams19:40

Well, when I was teaching at Highgate School, I found that I was teaching six days a week, and I suddenly found I wanted to paint. So some of the times I used to wander off and paint on Hampstead Heath. I used to come in the next morning, and the headmaster said, Oh, Cuppin, he said, by the way, you didn't come yesterday, did you? I said, Well, no, I didn't actually. He said, Well, you know, it would be a good thing if you did come. You have to get somebody else to take your classes. And I said, Well, I saw his point, and he was very nice about it. It was very nice schools, you know. And so then I started doing three days a week and got a friend to do the other three. But you didn't like teaching very much?

Sir Kyffin Williams20:17

I wasn't a good teacher, I don't think. Maybe for the older boys, but uh for the younger boys I just handing out paint and paper.

Presenter20:25

Record number five.

Sir Kyffin Williams20:25

Yeah.

Presenter20:25

Life.

Sir Kyffin Williams20:26

Uh

Sir Kyffin Williams20:26

At Highgate School, of course, I was very lucky to come across boys of considerable talent. And there were some very, very good musicians, it turned out. John Rutter, Howard Shelley, and John Tavernagh. But Howard Shelley concentrated on Rachmaninoff, and I've always loved Rachmaninoff. I always think of Tintoretto when I hear Rachmaninoff. And luckily, I got a record here of Howard Shelley playing Rachmaninsoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.

Presenter21:54

Howard Shelley playing part of Rachmaninoff's rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, with the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Bryden Thompson.

Presenter22:02

Um so you stayed at that school for nearly thirty years.

Presenter22:06

Although you you have admitted that you never really enjoyed teaching very much. Was it simply a means of keeping the wolf from the door?

Sir Kyffin Williams22:14

Yes, because I hadn't got a private income or anything like that, so I had to make money to buy my paint, and of course I bought an awful lot of paint. But why didn't you do it in Wales?

Presenter22:23

Hales, for example.

Sir Kyffin Williams22:24

I couldn't have got a job in Wales.

Presenter22:26

Couldn't you

Sir Kyffin Williams22:26

I don't think so, no.

Presenter22:27

But y you almost deliberately seem to have kept yourself away from that landscape that you loved, and relied on this visual library of yours.

Sir Kyffin Williams22:35

I suppose I did, but of course it was very, very important to be in London at a sort of formulating moments in your artistic life, because all the great works of art came to London in places like the National Gallery, and I could go and see them, and I have favourite pictures, and I look upon them as children, and I go and visit them occasionally.

Presenter22:53

How long was it then in that period before your income from from your art, from the commissions that you did or the paintings that you sold anyway, became more than your income as a teacher?

Sir Kyffin Williams23:02

Oh, I think more or less as soon as I left Hyggett school.

Sir Kyffin Williams23:06

I was never

Presenter23:06

It never happened in the twenty nine, thirty years ago.

Sir Kyffin Williams23:08

No, no, I was trying to live on two hundred pounds a year really and wasn't that easy because I owned so much from paint and canvas.

Presenter23:16

Two hundred pounds a year during what, during the fifties and the sixties.

Sir Kyffin Williams23:18

This was in the late forties, early fifties. It went up gradually. But when I left in nineteen seventy three, my salary is about one thousand eight hundred, I think.

Presenter23:30

So what convinced you you could finally leave and make it on your own without the income from teaching?

Sir Kyffin Williams23:35

Oh, I wasn't convinced at all. But luckily I launched myself as a painter onto the world when Wales was changing.

Sir Kyffin Williams23:45

The sons of miners, ministers, they couldn't have bought pictures themselves. They hadn't got the money. But because of better education in Wales, their children went to the universities and they became schoolmasters, architects, engineers. And suddenly a whole new market opened and I tapped that market. They seemed to like my pictures because my pictures reminded them of their homes on the farms.

Sir Kyffin Williams24:12

or both chapels where their fathers were were preaching or something like that. I was the first artist, Welsh artist I think ever to live in Wales and make a living in Wales.

Sir Kyffin Williams24:23

Next record.

Sir Kyffin Williams24:25

Well, John Tabernac, of course, um

Sir Kyffin Williams24:28

His recent work has moved me very much. It's tremendously sonorous and it carries you on, moving sort of t it's very much the same, but that is uh to its benefit. It it sort of wafts you along as part of it.

Presenter25:42

Part of John Taverner's The Protecting Veil, played by Stephen Issilis with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gernady Rozdesvenski. So you'd have been in your mid-fifties, Cuffyn Williams, when you upped and off and back to Wales to Anglesey, where you've really been ever since. You few notable exceptions, you've travelled, of course, to Patagonia and painted a Welsh community there. But fundamentally you you've kept to your own north west corner of Wales, and it it seems it doesn't cease to inspire you, even on or perhaps particularly on the coldest of days.

Sir Kyffin Williams26:14

I used to go out a lot in the snow and in the rain. Oddly enough.

Sir Kyffin Williams26:20

The rain doesn't seem to matter. It ought to seem to mix with your paint. It becomes a sort of putty. I gather there's some spit in there, too, something. Oh, I used to spit a lot, yes. And then I went to freezing. The spit used to freeze and it it gave a lovely texture.

Presenter26:30

Infusion.

Presenter26:34

It's bit for artistic effect. Oh, yeah.

Sir Kyffin Williams26:36

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly.

Presenter26:38

Also, your hands don't get cold for some reason. Explain to me.

Sir Kyffin Williams26:41

That was very odd, because I'm I suppose I'm a fairly cold person, but I used to be able to go out in the snow when it was below freezing point, and I never wore gloves or anything, and my left hand with my palette on it used to be immobile the whole time I was painting, and you'd have thought it would have got cold. It was cold for the first quarter of an hour, I think, when I was painting, and then suddenly it's all like bicycling up a hill, it's hard work, and you get to the top and then you freewheel. It's very much like that in painting, something starts to take over. And I found that I painted maybe up to an hour and hour and a half in this freezing cold, and at the end of it, when I'd finished, my hands would be absolutely roasting warm. As soon as I started cleaning the paint off my palette, I'd get cold. So it must have been some sort of yoga.

Presenter27:31

Or some sort of Celtic magic, you know.

Sir Kyffin Williams27:33

Well, I don't know about Celtic magic, but uh I think Vioga perhaps we're related to the Indians in some way.

Presenter27:39

And y you've lived there alone for the past twenty five years since since you went back. Your brother died some years ago, didn't he?

Sir Kyffin Williams27:43

Yeah.

Sir Kyffin Williams27:45

There's

Presenter27:46

Um, and you have no children, and he had no children, so you're the last in the line of your family.

Sir Kyffin Williams27:51

Well an awful lot of Williams is in Wales, so it doesn't really matter.

Presenter27:53

Well, your particular branch of the market. Uh

Sir Kyffin Williams27:56

And the sh

Presenter27:56

Oh, Lord yes.

Sir Kyffin Williams27:59

Oh Lord, yes, I most of my life. But somehow it it never worked obviously the epilepsy and everything and uh

Presenter28:06

And your paintings are your children, really, are they?

Sir Kyffin Williams28:08

I go round and talk to the pupils in primary schools. I don't go round to art schools. I mean, if they asked me, I would, but um I think um art schools are mainly tied up with sort of modern movement and things like that, which I disapprove of, and they know I disapprove of it. And and so but it's great

Presenter28:25

But it's great.

Sir Kyffin Williams28:27

Oh yes, and so much of what is called art now is just not art. I mean it's like calling sheep goats. They're probably not goats, but they're called goats. And what we get now is a totally loveless art. We get something which might be clever. Somebody's never thought of it before. I mean this is so stupid. Trying to be original is such a silly thing because art it will be original if it comes from somebody who is basically in touch with the world around them and feels enough. But to be consciously cerebrally original is just absolute plain nonsense.

Sir Kyffin Williams29:03

Go number seven.

Sir Kyffin Williams29:05

I'm lucky to live in the part of the world I do live in. It's a very, very lovely part of mountains and coast. And of course we have the hill farmers, and I used to draw them surreptitiously behind stone walls so they wouldn't see me. So one

Sir Kyffin Williams29:20

A man I love who's is singing is Bryn Tervell. Because Bryn Tervell, his father's a sheep farmer. And uh I admire Byn Tervell immensely because he's never lost uh the idea of being the son of a sheep farmer there. He's gone over all over the world and been acclaimed here, there and everywhere and he's still just Bryn Tervell Jones he is really Byn Tervell.

Speaker 429:43

Carlamor I Careguas.

Speaker 429:51

Kebim Shah Gairam Kaal.

Speaker 429:59

Oh angil hong, feder live.

Speaker 430:08

Akanbe A noros far.

Presenter30:31

Printerville singing Ar Lanamor, near the sea, with the orchestra of the Welsh National Opera, conducted by Gareth Jones. Your paintings, Cuffyn, these days, fetch huge amounts. I think one went for Richard Sotheby's for twenty thousand or so. I get the impression you don't like that very much.

Sir Kyffin Williams30:48

Well, I rather like my friends to buy my pictures. I've actually I'd rather like to give away all my pictures if I had a a whole lot of money I could live on. But I'd like to give them to all my

Sir Kyffin Williams30:59

All my friends, but because when I've sold them, they're gone. Some of my best pictures are actually lost now. I think I I'll never see them again.

Presenter31:07

Well, you mean being passed down through families so that you don't know what it belongs to?

Sir Kyffin Williams31:09

Yes, and then put on a sale somewhere and sold somebody else and then they've died and they've gone gone to somebody.

Presenter31:15

So you'd like to keep tabs on them more, wouldn't you?

Sir Kyffin Williams31:17

I'd like to, really. So that's why I'd like my friends to have them.

Presenter31:21

But d does it worry you what happens to your work? I I mean, you're you've been prolific, there's a lot of it there. What about the stuff you don't like?

Sir Kyffin Williams31:30

I don't like a lot of my work. In fact, if you came to my house, you wouldn't see a single painting hanging on the walls, because uh there's something wrong with every picture you paint. I know what's wrong with them, and it it would infuriate me if I had to sat and sit and look at them. It'd be terrible. So um I do paint a lot of bad pictures. Every time I moved when I was in London or somewhere else, I used to just burn about a hundred paintings and about five hundred drawings or something, because lots lot of massive rubbish. What I do now is I get a Stanley knife and go around cutting great holes in paintings and throwing the holes away.

Sir Kyffin Williams32:04

Because I can't bear to look at them.

Presenter32:06

And yet you go on doing it you're hooked for life for ever.

Sir Kyffin Williams32:09

Oh, I'm quite balmy as quite balmy.

Presenter32:12

No. Yeah.

Sir Kyffin Williams32:12

Strickland.

Sir Kyffin Williams32:14

With all these wonderful records, I think I must have something which would really make me happy if I was on a desert island. Something

Sir Kyffin Williams32:24

Not terribly deep, but some something which should make me dance or jump or something. And I love Scott Joplin.

Sir Kyffin Williams32:33

And the one I like best is the Entertainer and uh oh, he'd do me a lot of good on a desert island, I'm sure.

Presenter33:07

Scott Joplin's The Entertainer from the original soundtrack of the film The Sting played by Marvin Hamlish. Now if you could only take one of those eight records, Coffin, which one would you take?

Sir Kyffin Williams33:18

It would help me the Mara Hess, I think, because it would bring back Margareta Trip and all sorts of things, and it did make a tremendous impact on me.

Presenter33:27

She is you joy of man's desiring.

Sir Kyffin Williams33:28

Yeah.

Presenter33:29

Uh

Sir Kyffin Williams33:29

Uh

Presenter33:29

What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare already there.

Sir Kyffin Williams33:34

There was one book which made an immense impression on me, and that was Germinal by Emile Zola. It sort of tied up with all the horrors of the mining areas in Northern France. It tied up with Van Gogh and the Borinage, and it's a very, very long book, too, so I could read bits of it.

Presenter33:50

And your luxury, what would that be?

Sir Kyffin Williams33:53

But I originally wanted to take a dog because I've got to get something to catch things for me to eat. I told dogs. No dogs allowed. No dogs allowed. No, no. Oh, gosh.

Presenter34:00

I forgot.

Presenter34:01

Line.

Sir Kyffin Williams34:04

Well my favourite painting of all of course is Piero de la Francio Esfresco's Resurrection from Borgo San Sepolcro. But that of course is a fresco. The wise my favourite picture was I went to the slade to learn about art. I thought art was just learning how to copy things and we had to learn history of art in those days but I went to the Ashmoran Museum and I pulled out a book on Pyrrho and I opened it and there on that page there is Resurrection and I very soon found I was weeping whole bucket loads of tears. It wasn't the religious aspect of it, it was the emotional power of that painting.

Presenter34:43

Well, then you should take that as your luxury.

Sir Kyffin Williams34:45

Well, I would deprive the nation the world of it, and I couldn't do that. So I think possibly what I would like is a painting by a relatively unknown artist, a man called Michael Schwerz, a 17th-century contemporary of Vermeer. And this is a little painting, a head of a girl. It's in Leicester City Art Gallery. But it's quite a small painting, and I don't think the world would worry all that much if they were deprived of this beautiful little painting.

Presenter35:15

Sir Covin Williams, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 335:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.