Ceri Thomas is a Research Fellow in the post-war visual art culture of south Wales at the University of Glamorgan where he has done much work with the Zobole Archive. An artist himself, he has curated the recent Zobole touring exhibition.

Ernest Zobole (1927-1999) is the iconic painter of the Rhondda valleys, the engine-house of the industrial revolution which powered the British Empire. His career as an artist spanned the second half of the twentieth century, during which his chosen landscape declined into a post-industrial desert. His art practice developed alongside this decline as the changing landscapes and communities demanded new forms of expression. His early conventionally realist oils, tinged with elements of expressionism via van Gogh and Zobole’s friendship with Heinz Koppel, mutated into a post-cubist art for which he became internationally famous. In it, the picture became a physical and formal object on the surface of which Zobole's new ideas about form, space and time were worked out. His limited, rather monochromatic palette evolved under the influence of American colour-field painting and pop art to vivid, acid colours.
In addition to describing the development of one of the country's most recognisable painters, Ceri Thomas also explores Zobole's life, and through it what it meant, socially and culturally, to be a practising artist in late-twentieth-century Wales. This is a welcome study which works on many levels, and the ideal accompaniment to a series of retrospective exhibitions of Zobole's work.