The Magic Realism of Ernest Zobole

Zobole was born a year after the General Strike, to Italian immigrant parents in Ystrad, Rhondda. He grew up during the depression, in an already deprived area, to a family who, within the space of a few years, had grieved the loss of three of their six children. In 1948, Ernest Zobole, having served his National Service in Palestine and Egypt, and with the aid of an army grant, enrolled at Cardiff School of Art. This new and exciting chapter meant that for him, these years were defined more by the opportunities of Post-War Reconstruction, than by its aftermath and privations.

Zobole’s time at Cardiff was a joy; “It was a crazy time,” he remembered, “it was a little bit wild, but gently wild.” The highlight and resounding memory seem to have been of train journeys down to Cardiff, as his fellow students, Charles Burton, David Mainwaring, Nigel Flower and Gwyn Evans joined the train at various stops along the valley. They would take over a carriage, scattering their pictures over the seats and set about discussing and commenting on each other’s work, like latter-day Kardomah boys in motion. 

It was as a student that Zobole first met the artist Heinz Koppel at his studio in Dowlais. Impressed as he was by the German émigré’s work, what truly resonated with Zobole at this time and throughout his later career was Koppel’s devotion to his medium and the formal lessons he learnt through the process of creating images. He admired the fact that Koppel’s work was “all to do with paint”, and that he worked exclusively through the medium of “paint language”. From his discussions of his own work, it is clear that Zobole also aspired to this same instinctive approach: as he stated in one of his exhibition catalogues, “you do your talking or thinking with your medium…”

Following his studies Zobole took a teaching position at Llangefni County Secondary School in Anglesey. But away from Ystrad, with the camaraderie of his student days behind him, he felt lost on the island which inspired so many other artists. He complained that Llangefni was “all wind and chapel”, and at the first offer of a teaching job in Valleys, he was back in Ystrad, which, in his words was like “getting back into a warm bed.”

Meanwhile, Zobole’s depictions of everyday Welsh life were gaining attention. From the earliest years of his career, he was championed and singled out for praise by influential figures in the Welsh art world, such as David Bell, John Petts and Saunders Lewis.

As an artist so devoted to the formal process of creating his images, it was inevitable that Zobole’s work would be constantly evolving, but from the start of his career, we can see the recurring theme of challenging the rules of perspective. Even in his early work, streets tilt up or are flattened, as if seen from above. 

In addition to Heinz Koppel, he admired artists who, like him “weren’t imprisoned by perspective”, and he specifically mentions Marc Chagall, Ceri Richards, Stanley Spencer and the early Italian Masters.

Zobole had disliked Anglesey’s flat, windswept landscape, and on returning to Ystrad, he commented on “how small and confined, tiny the streets looked”. These were the narrow, claustrophobic places, set within an undulating landscape that inspired him. The buildings and their surroundings provided him with the necessary walls and angles to push against, to collapse and restructure. Likewise, roads and streetlamps, set down as if on a map, often provide lines to frame his shattered multiple viewpoints, which demolish the barriers of space and scale. As his work progressed, he would sometimes depict a horizon running all around the picture, suggesting a bowl (or indeed, a valley) in which to contain the shards of his kaleidoscopic, all-encompassing view of the community. 

Zobole’s curiosity as an artist manifests itself not only in individual images but throughout his whole output. He is always experimenting: his palette sometimes monochrome, sometimes explosively bright, he is semi-abstract, then returns to more figurative modes of representation. What remains constant is his devotion to using paint and mixed media on flat surfaces: again, we see the centrality of medium, his “paint language” to all his work. Between 1963 and retirement in 1984, he taught at Newport School of Art, and as the syllabus put more emphasis on conceptual art, video performance and photography throughout the 60s and 70s, he expressed regret that “painting had come to an end, or at least it was relegated to a low position.”

It is clear from his interview with Tony Curtis (published in the book Welsh Artists Talking) that Zobole was not the kind of artist to conceptualise his work. When Curtis presses him on the meaning of his themes, his usual fluency escapes him. Questions are put to him about the significance of his many nightscapes and the meaning of solitary figures boxed within rectangles – do they refer to coffins? asked Curtis, not unreasonably.

“I don’t see any meaning to them at all,” replied Zobole, finally concluding, in exasperation, “I don’t know what ‘meaning’ is.” 

Zobole was not an artist given to talking up his work: for him, the pictures themselves were enough. And yet his images, for all his painterly emphasis on formal considerations, are viscerally accessible. His pictures really do talk to us – they can be serene, invigorating or haunting. Dai Smith, Eric Rowan and Shelagh Hourahane have all applied the term “Magic Realism” to Zobole’s work. No doubt, he would have been baffled by this, and yet his work magically transforms the Rhondda, inviting the viewer to experience and revel in the alchemy of his creative process, through which he presents us with extraordinary spaces to explore.

by Ruth Richards

View all lots by Ernest Zobole in April's Welsh Sale