Robin Mason

Part of the larger body of work exploring painting, landscape, writing, and family history, this painting emerges from my engagement with an archive of letters, photographs, and press cuttings, tracing my father’s family from the early 1900s and their experiences in and beyond Wales.

Painting, for me, is a private conversation; each brushstroke suggests the next, and the painting responds, revealing its own path forward. Their house, Bryn-Myrddin in Pontardawe, becomes more than a family home—it intertwines with the myth of Merlin, whose presence echoes through the mythological forests, the landscape of the area and the archive itself, shaping our journeys through history.

The path in these paintings is pink, as pink as the bedsit walls I lived with when I first moved to London. There, I wrote small poems and made paintings about Wales, longing to exist in two places at once. The path to Bryn-Myrddin both leads to and departs from its destination, but like the journey in The Alchemist, the archive has shown me that the treasure was always where we began.

This process has been filled with moments of deep intensity—searching for images to stand in for lost voices, encountering ancestors for the first time through their letters, press clippings, and fragile negatives from over a century ago. These discoveries collapse time, bringing the past into focus in ways I never expected.

 

William Hogarth wrote, “…I have endeavoured to treat my subjects as a dramatic writer; my picture is my stage, and men and women my players…” In this work, I seek not answers but spaces of wonder, where painting unfolds like a stage play—marks and images becoming actors in a silent drama, filled with mystery, presence, and possibility.

 

What initially felt like a closed composition, a single-panel painting, has opened itself up, insisting on a wider frame.

 

The photographs, letters, and fragments gathered from Bryn Myrddin have revealed new relational lines: subtle continuities between generations, emotional correspondences carried through stories, gestures, and shadows.

 

This process is making me realise that the archive is not simply a repository of material, but a dynamic structure, one that behaves more like a constellation than a catalogue. Each document or image activates another; each memory fragment creates an unexpected point of connection. The residency has given me the time to sit within these interrelations, to allow them to surface slowly and influence the logic of the work.

 

The move toward a triptych feels like a natural response to this widening scope. The Isenheim Altarpiece became a useful conceptual model, not for its religious function, but for its ability to hold multiple temporalities and emotional registers in a single unfolding structure.

 

Placing my great grandparents on one wing and The Boy with the Monkey (my father) on the other allows the central panel to breathe differently. It becomes a hinge, a site where the past and present fold into each other.

 

What this residency is teaching me, above all, is that creative practice thrives in the space between reflection and making, a space where the archive, the image, and the imagination can co-exist in a productive tension. Bryn Myrddin continues to expand, revealing itself not only as a house from the past, but as a conceptual architecture for future work.

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