The Presence of Absence - Hedd Wyn

Oil on Board

20.5x25.5cm (board)

28x33cm (framed)

I visited Yr Ysgwrn, the home of Hedd Wyn, late on an extraordinarily hot afternoon in August, just a few hours before the solar eclipse.

I was the only visitor on the tour and had the enormous privilege of being able to spend time quietly looking around the house, accompanied by the incredible guides.

What stayed with me most was the stillness and the sense of absence there. It was personified, of course, by the empty chair, his chair - Yr Gadair Ddu - the one he won posthumously at the National Eisteddfod in Birkenhead in 1917 just 5 weeks after he was killed at Passchendaele.

Seeing the chair there (although in reality it’s displayed in another room) in the quiet of his family home, seemed to say something about absence that I knew I wanted to paint.

There are places where the people who once lived there somehow still feel present. Yr Ysgwrn was one of those places for me.