ABSTRACT
BY T H E E N D OF T H E 1 9 5 0 s John Elwyn’s figurative subjects increasingly gave way to pure landscape. The strong geometrical aspects of the pat terned landscape, organised and divided into fields with hedgerows and stone walls, especially appealed to his sense of design. (Plates xxm & xxxi) O ff the Main R oad painted in 1959 is typical of the new formalised decorative surface created by the juxtaposition of interesting land forms and remote villages; the picture plane is frac tured to lesser or greater degrees in his analysis of form. Sceptical of his gradual departure from traditional modes of representation, David Bell commented upon this new mannerism which he attributed to the characteristics of the Cardiganshire landscape itself:
He seems to describe his forms by breaking them up into a pattern of facets of colour and tone, so that at times they appear to have a uniform appearance of paper which has been crushed and then flattened out not very successfully. In this way his surfaces tend to lose continuity and his forms their substance. I have always wondered whence this mannerism was derived until I stood one winter afternoon outside his home by the Teifi and looked across the river to the steep hillside opposite. Up it climbed the stone walls and the lime washed walls of house and farm and chapel, set amid the evergreen shrubs and the bare boughs in just such a mosaic of facets and with an appearance just as papery as John Elwyn uses with his brush.103
