Robin Mason

On the Path to Bryn-Myrddin, is part of a larger body of work exploring painting, writing, and family history. It emerges from my engagement with the 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 archive, shaping our journey 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—