I began to draw everything, storing images away in a vast library of visual information’. (K.W. Drawings, Gomer, 2001)
Prescribed to take up art for the good of his health, painting for Kyffin rapidly became an obsession, as it was in painting he initially felt that he could express himself most effectively. However he soon realised that regular drawing would be greatly beneficial to his art practice.
It is interesting to note that Kyffin, in appraising his drawing, saw it as a process of creating an important and valuable resource to be utilised in the future – his own personal store of images.
It is these drawings that make up the largest proportion of his Bequest to the Library. Only a small percentage appear to be studio drawings; the bulk of the works have been executed in the field and then torn from their bound sketch books for ease of reference and use. Their direct observational nature is evidenced by their immediacy and vitality. His detailed diaries from the 1990s provide regular references to drawing of a variety of locations and subjects.
Few of the drawings are actually dated, but on stylistic grounds they span his long career as an artist. Works executed abroad (& dated from secondary evidence) being particularly useful in establishing a chronology for cataloguing his early work, such as this drawing of Paris from the mid 1950s.
Iwan Dafis