'Pwerdy Ceunant' by Mary Lloyd Jones
This audio clip describes the painting Pwerdy Ceunant by Mary Lloyd Jones (b.1934).
It has been created for use as part of our primary school resource, The Superpower of Looking, in order to support pupils with blindness or visual impairment to take part in the lessons.
Explore the painting further in our resource, A colourful Welsh landscape by Mary Lloyd Jones.
Full audio description text
This painting is in oil paints on a canvas, about 1.5 metres high and 1.85 metres wide. It’s covered with colourful patches of paint and Welsh words, plus signs and symbols like arrows. It’s inspired by a Welsh landscape, and shows a gorge, or ravine, but it doesn’t try to show it like a photograph. Instead blocks of colour filling the lower half of the canvas hint at the shape of a mountain, sloping down from the centre. They are mostly a sandy brown colour towards the left, but with different sized rectangles of purple, grey, turquoise, pink and blue towards the right and along the mountain top.
A wavy, white line, scratched into the paint, traces the ridge of the mountain – rising from the lower right-hand corner towards the centre, where blue arrows are pointing towards another wavy, white line further up. This might be the ridge of another mountain hanging downwards that fills the upper part of the canvas, where you might expect the sky to be. It could be the other side of the gorge.
Here black paint is smeared across smaller rectangles and dabs of paint that are blue, purple and various shades of pink. More of these dabs fill the space between the two ridge lines.
Spread across the painting, are words in Welsh and place names, including 'Banc', 'Pwerdy', 'Cwm', 'Newidion', 'Llety Synod'. Some are in rounded letters and others are in more angular, spiky writing.
The initials MLJ and the number 19 are painted in purple in the bottom right-hand corner. These are the initials of the artist Mary Lloyd Jones who painted this in 2019.
