Relationships with Pictures

Beneath the surface of pictures lie the extensive networks of relationships and associations that tie us to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways. In pictures the past lives, and forms the basis of who we will become. The moments at which we come to understand something of ourselves and our place in the world are often anchored in images – literary, musical and visual. Through fifteen pictures Peter Lord describes the evolution of his own sense of self, in childhood just after the Second World War, at art college in the 1960s, through the tension between incomers and local people in Wales in the 1970s and 80s, and finally through his exploration of the place they have had in the lives of the artists who created them, their patrons and the general public. Publication coinciding with exhibition launch at the Welsh National Library and release of a new edition of The Tradition, winner of Wales Non-Fiction Book of the Year (2017) -- Publisher: Parthian Books
Peter Lord’s autobiographical Relationships with Pictures reveals political and philosophical motivations as much as it does personal ones. Lord has selected fifteen images, visual references to his private and professional past, that serve as a platform from which he creates a ‘morally coherent construct of history’. Relationships with Pictures aims to rewrite Wales’s previously misrepresented and under-appreciated visual heritage. In fact, it vehemently contests claims that the nation’s visual art culture is characterised by deficiency or absence. Convinced of the unique relationship that pictures grant us with the past, Lord merits the material and physical experience that we have with art and artefacts. Around the images in this book, which are varied in both style and source, Lord organises a narrative that describes familial histories, an introspective youth, adult friendships and professional relationships with other artists. Furthermore, the historical and social context of these images allows Lord to deliver his readers an alternative guide to modern Welsh political history and the artistic outputs it inspired. As well as first-hand experiences, Lord’s writing is informed by critical art theory, historical theory and social political theory. Relationships with Pictures is investigative in its approach in that it comes out of Lord’s determined detective work. The author’s trawling of archives, raiding of lofts, analysis of letters and conducting of interviews lead him to discover the works of unknown artists, as well as the contexts from which their art emerged. Lord explains that these works have been excluded from popular Welsh history because they remain at odds with the country’s dominant colonial traditions. Judgements of quality and value have been reserved by institutions that are effectively English in their symbolism and value systems. What is evident from Lord’s book is that he feels an overwhelming responsibility towards his adoptive nation and the reclamation of its visual culture. With an impulse towards ‘mending things’, as well as a somewhat rebellious nature, Lord validates Welsh art with the recognition it has been denied by traditional art criticism. -- Pearl Newton @ www.gwales.com