Keys to Transformation

A monograph on Ceri Richards & Dylan Thomas

In November 1953, a few hours before the death of Dylan Thomas in New York, the Welsh artist Ceri Richards made a series of forty drawings in a copy of Thomas's Collected Poems 1934-1952. In 1976, the artist Frances Richards, Ceri's widow showed this extraordinary book of drawings to Richard Burns, who urged Alan Clodd, the founding editor of Enitharmon Press, to republish it as a limited edition. This book appeared in 1980, under the title Ceri Richards: Drawings to Poems by Dylan Thomas,  with an introduction by Richard Burns.

Taking as its point of departure the 1953 Drawings and their variants, Keys to Transformation provides valuable insights into both Richards’s and Thomas’s work. It explores Ceri Richards’s working methods, his development in the light of Thomas’s influence, and the symbols common to his and Thomas’s work. It focuses in depth on the mysterious Afal du Brogwyr (‘Black Apple of Gower’) paintings and drawings, in which Richards aimed to express ‘the great richness, the fruitfulness and great cyclic movement and rhythms of the poems of Dylan Thomas’.

Writing about one work in this series, Carl Gustav Jung told the artist in a letter that he read ‘a confession of the secret of of our time’. The book’s concluding discussion of the nature of this ‘secret’ has wider implications for anyone concerned with art and poetry.

Ceri Richards was born in 1903 a few miles from Thomas’s own birthplace on the Gower Peninsula, and he died in London in 1971, eighteen years to the day after Thomas. Richards is now recognised as  the greatest Welsh painter of his time. Thomas had a far-reaching influence on his mature work.

Richard Burns first came to the work of Ceri Richards when he was commissioned to translate a book on the artist by the Italian poet Roberto Sanesi (The Graphic Works of Ceri Richards, Cerastico, Milan, 1973). Sanesi was a personal friend of the artist. Richard Burns then collaborated with the painter Frances Richards (wife of Ceri Richards) to produce Some Poems, Illuminated and Lettered by Frances Richards (Entharmon Press, London, 1977). His essay on the work of Roberto Sanesi is available here. 

 

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