Where the Break Holds on the Path to Bryn Myrddin
2025, 60cm x 50cm, Oil and Acrylic on Board
This painting carries the memory of a room — and of my great-uncle Cyril Lewis (1904-1966), The Boy with the Monkey’s uncle.
The hanging chain is not restraint. It recalls the chain fixed to the ceiling in the back room at Bryn Myrddin, the simple, necessary device that allowed Cyril to pull himself upright after a mining accident broke his back. It marks the point where effort met architecture, where the body learned, day by day, how to negotiate with gravity, surrounded by my grandmother Letitcia’s murals.
The broken bow is not defeat but redirection. Its tension has changed shape, curving inward, finding another way to hold. Cyril’s life did the same. Confined to bed for fifteen years and enduring more than thirty operations, his strength did not vanish — it learned patience.
The stump exposes its rings openly: time, repetition, recovery. Nothing is hidden. The ladder-like planks suggest access rather than ascent, not climbing back to what was lost, but finding a way into a changed life. The background carries echoes of Letitcia’s painted walls, wooded, vertical, flowing. Those murals gave Cyril movement when his body could not. They were not decoration but survival: landscapes he could enter when pain loosened its grip.
And from the break grows mistletoe. In folklore, mistletoe appears where lightning has struck. It is sacred not because it is innocent, but because it survives damage. Toxic and healing at once, it holds the paradox of endurance. For my great-uncle, meaning did not arrive before pain; it emerged from within it, through song in a bombed hospital, through charity, through presence. I think of Cyril singing in the hospital during the Blitz, unable to move while the building shook. Of him organising charitable coffee mornings, hospital balls, carnival nights, of him being elected to the board of 3 hospitals, despite and because of his experiences. Of him becoming, quietly, The Oak of Pontardawe.
This is not a painting about triumph. It is about sacred positivity — the kind that grows only after something has been broken open.