peter prendergast

“Peter Prendergast has died aged 60 and Wales registers an enormous and untimely loss.”
These words by David Alston of the Arts Council of Wales summed up the response of many throughout Wales to the news that the artist Peter Prendergast had died suddenly, while out walking, on January 14th. No other painter in Wales has produced such an vivid and dynamic a body of work, drawing in major part on a lifelong absorption with the landscape. His dramatic expressionistic landscapes of the area around where he lived in Deiniolen created for him a reputation as one of the leading exponents on the United Kingdom of expressionistic landscape painting.
He was also a hugely respected and important art teacher, both from from his earlier days in Ysgol Dyffryn Ogwen, Bethesda, and more recently at Coleg Menai, Bangor, where, from 1980 onwards, his influence on successive intakes of students was far-reaching. This exhibition forms a tribute to and celebration of Peter Prendergast’s life and work. The works have been selected by the artist’s son, Owein, and daughter, Daisy, both of whom are artists and were always his sternest critics. It covers a wide time span, up to his most recent works, and through the portraits shown and works painted in Ireland and elsewhere, shows that the range of his interests went far beyond the landscapes of north Wales for which he was best known and justly acclaimed.
Peter Prendergast was one of Wales’s best-known artists and his loss is a great one. The exhibition is an opportunity to see just why his work was so highly-regarded and sought after, and a chance to see in the most dramatic form the moods of the landscapes of north Wales which he ceaselessly tried to capture on canvas.
The exhibition will tour to Newport Museum and Art Gallery, 21 July – 1 September 2007. Works in the exhibition are not for sale.