Glenys Cour: Swansea’s Creative Icon Celebrating 100 Years of Welsh Art

Celebrated painter Glenys Cour MBE has been a central part of Wales’s artistic life since the 1940s. MARK REES caught up with her in her Mumbles home.

(This interview was first published in The Bay magazine, Winter 2023)

In the late 1940s, when Glenys Cour set foot in war-scarred Swansea, little could she have known that she would soon be a central part of the city’s greatest artistic flourishing.
Having been tutored in Cardiff by Dunvant’s hugely influential modernist painter Ceri Richards, the young artist from Fishguard arrived at Swansea College of Art, where she would meet her husband-to-be and rub shoulders with the many poets, musicians, artists and thinkers who shared ideas over coffee and cigarettes in the original Kardomah café. This group of local bohemians, dubbed the Kardomah Gang, included the likes of composer Daniel Jones, artist Alfred Janes, poet Vernon Watkins, and a certain writer called Dylan Thomas.

“I’ve been so lucky,” Glenys tells me when recalling those days.
“It was a marvellous time. I didn’t realise it then, but it was a very good time in Swansea. The fact that people were so close together, and ideas passed from one to the other. If you went into the Kardomah, that’s where the element of art, in all the arts, lived. It was a really little café, but that’s where the essence of art for Swansea lived.”

What makes this creative outpouring especially remarkable is that it happened despite – or possibly because – the shadow of the Second World War loomed large over the then-town, with a savage three nights’ blitz devastating Swansea to such an extent that, architecturally at least, it has yet to recover.

“Swansea was flat,” Glenys remembers. “There was no Swansea – it was absolutely flat.”

When she arrived at the college in 1947 to attend a life drawing class, she discovered that she wasn’t the only new arrival from out of town. Her lecturer introduced her to a young man who had just returned to his hometown from London’s Royal College of Art – a young man who she would soon share a surname with: the artist Ronald Cour.

“He had the most beautiful hands, and I fell in love with his hands!” she says of the instant attraction, and set about concocting an ingenious plan to ‘accidentally’ bump into him outside of class.

“I didn’t know anybody in Swansea at the time and I’d go to evening classes, and one evening I went to the loo and waited for everyone to leave until I heard these footsteps coming down the corridor. I opened the door and bumped into him, and we walked down the stairs together. When we reached the bottom he said ‘I’m going for a drink, come with me.’ I’d never been in a pub in my life – in my family, I wouldn’t dare! – and I went.”

The rest, as they say, is history, and not only did it prove to be her first date with her future husband, but her first meeting with “a whole bevy of Swansea intellectuals”, including several of the aforementioned Kardomah Gang. It would prove to be a fruitful introduction to lifelong friends and acquaintances, and in the decades that have passed, Glenys has not only established herself as one of Wales’s most celebrated painters, but much more besides. She dedicated several decades to teaching in the same university where she herself studied, was one of the founders of the Mission Gallery and Swansea Arts Society, and in 2020 was recognised for her services to the visual arts with an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Now 99 years young, she will soon be receiving a letter from the current monarch to mark her upcoming centenary birthday, and remains entirely devoted to her craft, as is apparent from the moment you step into her Mumbles home. An Aladdin’s cave of objects that would put many an art gallery to shame, the paintings and sculptures have been organised with a curator’s eye in a living room that offers the perfect panoramic views of the curving bay. There is also a dedicated studio space where Glenys spends most of her daylight hours.

“I’m still working,” she tells me, adding with a laugh: “What else am I going to do? I go up to the studio, I open the window, I can hear the birds in the trees behind me, and I work all day. I come down to eat, but otherwise I literally work all day, until the light goes.”

Glenys’s relentless work ethic has resulted in a prolific output of immersive landscapes that can be seen dotted around her home. These scenes of vast open spaces and wave-crashing coastlines are both imaginary and of their place, having been pictured in her mind but assembled from aspects of the real world. Glenys describes this process as accessing a diary or a library of ideas that have been collected from a lifetime of looking, a method she compares to writing a piece of poetry.

“When you come to my age, it’s like a diary of your experiences,” she says. “I’ve been painting landscapes all my life, and because I’m a painter, I’m visually aware all the time. It’s always in the back of your brain, like a library of ideas. The ideas are not necessarily photographic things but poetic things, derived out of landscape. Painting is poetry expressed in a different medium. You have to have experience if you want to write a poem, the same thing applies visually.”

As such, you might find aspects of Gower and Swansea Bay in her visual poetry, even if the canvases don’t necessarily depict a specific view.

“Without realising it, you’re taking in all the things around you, and then when it comes to making a statement, you extract from that the elements that will say what you want to say visually. One is in words, one is in paint, but it’s exactly the same; you’ve got to have something to say when you paint, to be expressing some experience – joy, sorrow, whatever, painting is just a means of expressing it.”

Glenys is clearly an artist with her own style, and while she expresses her admiration for several influences, from the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko who she “adores” to the trailblazing Pablo Picasso, she remains true to her own vision and her own ideas of abstraction.

“Abstraction is taking your experience down to the edge, trying your hardest to express it, and it becomes more and more simple, a visual that is apparently a simple experience, but it isn’t. It gives much more depth, and it gives you the opportunity of a bigger experience than if it was put down in a photograph.”

As such, this endless quest to express her ideas keeps Glenys’s work as fresh today as when she first arrived in Swansea all those years ago.

“I’ve got my vision, and that’s what I do.”

Glenys Cour’s paintings can be seen regularly at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.

Got a story idea or looking for a feature writer? Mark is always open to new ideas and commissions — get in touch!