Robin Mason

I only knew Henry Lewis through a handful of photographs and a few fragments of recollection carried by my father. Born in 1889 in Llanfynydd, Carmarthenshire, he lived at Bryn Myrddin and worked alongside his father and brother in the Tin Plate Works. During the First World War he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery, positioned behind the front lines, where industrialised warfare reshaped land and body alike. By 1921 he was working as a coal hewer at the infamous Tirreni Colliery. He died in Swansea in 1930, aged forty-one, from tuberculosis, contracted through the woman he loved and was engaged to marry, whose illness took her life first. Another quiet wound absorbed into the Lewis family of Alltwen.

 

This painting is not a portrait of Henry, nor an illustration of his history. It is an attempt to encounter him through the archive and through reverie. As with others in the family archive, the material would not remain inert. Photographs, dates, and places pressed forward, asking not to be ordered but attended to.

 

Henry appears here as a weighted, darkened figure, marked by labour and loss, yet sprouting green oak leaves. The oak is not symbolic in any fixed sense; it arrived phenomenologically, through the act of painting itself. The leaves remain green because attention has been given. He returns not as he was, but as he can now be known.

 

The forest is not landscape but archive: dense, layered, resistant to linear time. Tools, labour, and industry are embedded in its ground. The red shovel, the suspended weight, the book and letter at the base are residues of work, knowledge, and inheritance. Pink leaks beneath the scene, not as colour but as memory, the psychic ground where Wales and elsewhere meet.

 

Engaging with Henry’s memory disturbed sleep. Questions arrived at night: how to image someone on the verge of slipping away? Painting became a way of staying with that uncertainty. Henry is not recovered, but briefly re-encountered, held long enough to remain.