Ernest Zobole, painter

Ernest Zobole 1927-1999

Ernest Zobole is regarded as one of Wales's "most important artists...one of the visionary artists of Wales" (Peter Wakelin, "CASW Annual Report, 2003, p.9). His subject was often singular: the night-time Rhondda Valley in South Wales and his home and family in it. However, the way in which he used his chosen subject shows that his paintings illustrated his 'vision of the way in which we sense the world'.

His parents had emigrated from Italy in about 1910 to settle in Britain. Here, Ernest was born in April 1927, in Ystrad Rhondda an important coal mining area in Wales at that time. The Rhondda Valley and its industry was a melting pot of peoples from all over Europe which was re-aligning itself after the First World War. "The Rhondda" had become famous around the globe for its industrial and trade union muscle and had, to some extent, become synonymous with Wales. As so often under such circumstances, this environment was a fountain of energy and creativity. Talents emerged which contributed to the area's fame. By 1948 (the year when Zobole started his art school training) several talented young men from the same locality descended upon art school in Cardiff (David Mainwaring, Ernest Zobole, Charles Burton, Robert Thomas, Nigel Flower, Gwyn Evans & Thomas Hughes followed by Islwyn Watkins, Kerry Barclay, Peter Leyshon, Geoff Salter, see Peter Lord 1998 p.247). They challenged the established order at art school and became loosely known as "The Rhondda Group". Their philosophy was 'make it new, but make it true'

At first, Zobole painted more or less in accordance with what he had been taught. By 1960, however, he began to move into new territory of his own choosing. He switched from painting on canvas to painting on board, as well as going in for more monochrome colours. He also began to use impasto, partly applied with a palette knife. Series of paintings were thus created such as 'Ystrad and People' and 'People in a Street' [examples]. These paintings, and others painted in the same style up to the mid-1960s, are now regarded as possibly "...the most daring phase of his development. Away from the perceptual -the picture as a conventional window or mirror on the world- and towards the conceptual -the picture as a flat surface or object in its own right- (Ceri Thomas, 'Ernest Zobole: a retrospective', 2004 p.9).

By 1967 Zobole had found the form that he had been searching for. He returned to using a broader spectrum of colour. His images over the next twenty years, during which he was also a full-time lecturer at Art School in Newport/Gwent, turned out to be "his most colourful and less modulated than before" (C.Thomas, 2004, p.22) [examples].
In 1984 Zobole retired from lecturing to become a full-time painter. Although he retained, even expanded his colour palette, there is a noticeable change in form. This has been interpreted as reflecting the reasons for his early retirement [examples].

At the beginning of the nineties the artist had reached the height of his creative powers. As his biographer, Ceri Thomas, describes it: "...his choice of nocturnal, carboniferous, jackdaw blue-blacks in the 1990s [examples] was one that evolved out of lengthy contemplation of the real and profound consideration of the conceptual". Thomas concludes in saying: "...late Zoboles are also very modern due to their mix of the recessive, the flat and abstracted, and his wrap-around horizons...this allusion to a shared yet singular transcience and mortality is ever more evident in his very late works". Ernest Zobole died in 1999.