Ieuan Ress of the Lettering & Calligraphy Studio

About Ieuan Rees

Continued from the homepage...

But it's not just the products of his craft that are so highly rated and so much commissioned, his skills are just as prized. Fellow carvers want to learn 'the how' of it too. In his studio just outside Ammanford he gives master classes in stone carving and pupils - many already practicing stone carvers themselves - travel from across the Atlantic and from Australasia for individual or small group tuition.
He is a born teacher, explaining the nature of his craft throughout the two and a half hours I am with him. He is a generous man both with his time and with the hard-won insights and knowledge of his work. Never at a loss for words, never pedantic, he explains his craft in a way that opens up not just the manual skills, but the artistic background and the practical reasons which determine just why what he's explaining should be so.
Five minutes into our meeting he picks up a chisel and mallet and demonstrates how letters are carved. He works at a quite remarkable pace considering the nature of the raw material - in this case polished slate. With no guide lines to help him, no preliminary sketch, he produces a perfect freehand 'H', a letter which turns out to be far more precise than anything I could have done with pen on paper.
Then in answer to my question he gives a brief exposition on the relativemerits for a stone carver of serif and sans serif type faces; the difference, for example, between H (palatino-serif) and H (helvetica-sans serif).
Typically leuan's explanation starts, not with the shape of the letters, but with the anatomy of the human body. The carver's motors - shoulder and wrist -work best on curves. Curves also make it easier for the chisel to get into the stone. Serif is, therefore, the stone carver's preferred medium.
But there is more.
He broadens the enlightenment, delving into both our experience of education and the workings of the human eye. As anyone involved in publishing and printing will tell you the little 'decorative' bits on the letters you are now reading - this Palatino Serif font - in fact have a practical use. They lead your eyes onto the next letter. And on and on. It's the type face used when there is a lot or reading to do - when you don't want to hold the eye from understanding what is being said. Serif is the tool of education - the exchange of ideas on paper.
Studying individual letters however - remember those Janet and John books - is something best done in sans serif. It holds the eye and concentrates the mind on the short message picked out. Road signs are done in sans serif. The information is not so much read as imprinted on the mind.
Serif takes the eye horizontally from left to right. Sans serif takes the eye up and down. So serif brings education and the working of the eye together.
Some organisations - the BBC is a good example - have a house style which is sans serif. For leuan such work takes longer to carve and is physically harder to do, the wrist can't slide into the action.
"Sans serif can't be human," is leuan's aphorism, an observa¬tion so striking it will now stay with me till I too am scattered ashes under a serif memorial plaque - if I'm lucky.
He has many of these little sayings, phrases that stop you in your tracks and stick in the mind. Such things are the mark of the born teacher, challenging the novice to stop and think.

So where did he pick up his own education?
leuan is a product of the Gwendraeth. He was born in Pontyberem and brought up in Tumble where he went to prima¬ry school.
Later he went on to the Gwendraeth Grammar School where he was a contemporary of Barry John, Ken Jones and Carwyn James, illustrious names in the history of rugby football. leuan says he was 'bloody useless' at rugby.
Cricket, however, was another mat¬ter. Here his stubbornness was an advantage and he was opening bat for Tumble. Opposition teams couldn't get him out but leuan didn't score many runs. His captain's instructions were always the same: "Bat until the shine is off the new ball and then either hit out or get out."
This doggedness and willingness to graft are evident in his stone-carving. Several times during our talk he tells of the uncomfortable conditions he has had to work under on different commissions. Not all the carving is done in his studios. Sometimes he works outside in all weathers. Precision under pressure - hour after hour.
The carving of the semi-circular stone backing of the fountain in the award winning Peace Garden in Sheffield - a piece of work 120 feet long and three feet high, incorporating some 250 letters - was done, "in situ, in the rain and the cold and the sludge. It took two of us a week."
That ability to work under the worst of conditions is probably in the blood, for his father, Owen Rees, was a miner. His mother, Lilian, despite having next to no formal education, had a gift for poetry. There were few books in the home and leuan's first experience of type-faces came as a result of his membership of Ebenezei Methodist Chapel.
It was not something you'd expect. No lettering of banners or copying oi memorable bits of scripture. Not eve: the chapel notices. He was given the job of backing the chapel's stock of hymnals in brown paper. He wrote the titles on the paper himself by hand employing the type face used by the Daily Herald. It was his first exercise in lettering.
Even so his interest in calligraphy the word comes from callos graphos or beautiful writing, though it was never described as such at the time -had already shown through. When 1 was twelve Mr Pears, his Latin master at the Gwendraeth gave him back his homework with the comment, "Are you interested in art? I see from your hand-writing you like beautiful writing. The only trouble is it's completely illegible."
Buoyed by this back-handed compliment leuan vowed to keep the writing style but wondered how he was going to make it readable. Apparently he never came up with the answer for he says it's something he still puzzles over to this day.
But the course of his life was decided at the age of fifteen when his uncle Hywel Harries from Aberystwyth, a cartoonist, illustrator and painter, having noticed his nephew's interest in writing, gave him a set of calligraphy nibs and a twenty minute demonstration of how to use them.
"I was hooked."
He went on to Carmarthen School of Art where despite having no tutor capable of teaching the subject he took lettering and taught himself, though he emphasises how important drawing and design are in his work.
Matriculating successfully he went on to the Camberwell School of Art to take lettering and illuminating. It was here that he was introduced to carving on slate. After Camberwell came three years at the Royal College of Art studying graphic design. After college he stayed on in London freelancing in calligraphy, stone carving and graphic design. He also taught one day a week back at Camberwell, a commitment to passing on his skills he was to keep for the next 27 years, going on to work at colleges of art in Newport, Swansea and finally Carmarthen.
Carmarthen turned out to be a ter¬minus. A dispute with one of Her Majesty's Inspectors saw him leaving the teaching profession. Since, once again, it shows up his doggedness, this brush with authority is worth the retelling.
Initiaslly the HMI praised him for his pupils' success rates - always the sign or a good teacher - but then he went on to criticise leuan for not sticking to the rule book in terms of the outlined course. He had not been filling in his lesson plans properly and was ticked off - in front of his class - for this neglect of his duties. Where many teachers would have bowed the knee to keep their job leuan was having none of it.
"No artist knows what he's doing six months in advance - only bureaucrats can do that. You have to adapt to the individual in teaching.
"This was not accepted by him. He was a pen pusher. So I packed it in. I cared about it too much."
So, over a HMI's bureaucratic intransigence, and it has to be said, leuan's unbending pride, 27 accumulated years of teaching experience from one of the world's foremost stone/slate carvers was lost to the students of Carmarthenshire, so that now, as we have seen, it is available only to those rich enough to pay the air-fare from California or Melbourne.
At this time he was married to Barbara, a watercolourist and a lover of the countryside. They had both decided it was time to come home. They found a derelict woollen mill on the Loughor in the Ammanford-Llandybie area. "It is absolutely beautiful," he says.
Planning permission was a problem until leuan wrote to the Carmarthen Journal criticising bureaucracy's attitude to one who had returned and who would be of service to the land of his birth. Planning permission duly followed.
They had two daughters Vicky (13) and Angharad (6). The family went through a trauma when a few years back Barbara died. Since then Ieuan has married again to Margaret, also a watercolourist.
Two years ago his life and work were honoured when he was invited to become a member of the Gorsedd as a white robed bard. It's an honour he cherishes and a public acknowledgement of his continuing role as an ambassador for Wales.

Over the years he has been associated with the National Eisteddfod in several ways, most recently as an adjudicator of the arts and crafts pieces submitted at Llanelli.
For the Llandeilo Eisteddfod he designed a plate for sale which was illustrated with a raven, symbol of the Lord Rhys of Dinefwr. Interestingly he came up against some age-old sales resistance oased on superstition. A black bird is still regarded with fear in parts of Wales and it was only when he redesigned the plate and made the raven smaller that sales picked up.
A side of his work which has increased enormously in the last ten years is that of headstones for graves. He puts the increased demand partly down to a glut of cheap foreign granite which has flooded the monumental masonry business and partly to the decrease in the amount of hand carving done by masons - now almost a thing of the past. leuan designs every individual headstone after discussing it in detail with the family. It is work which takes time but this suits the slow process of both bereave¬ment and burial - for the earth takes nine months to settle before a gravestone can be laid, leuan is keen to stress that he keeps abreast of modern technology. Though all finished work is done by hand, he uses the computer to help prepare the design work, so speeding the preparation enormously.
As you would expect he gets a lot of job satisfaction, though he confesses every new job is difficult to start -and just as hard to stop. "But the journey in between is wonderful." He is full of advice to would-be artists.
"Irrespective of their field, everything should be based on drawing. I have always based everything on drawing. Drawing a letter is no different than drawing the leaf of a tree. Nowadays there is not enough drawing of things.
"Drawing educates the eye to look and observe. It disciplines the eye, the mind and the hand. He has reservations about striving for perfection - in work and life.
"You shouldn't worry about the end result. That's fatal. If you do justice to the subject and you do justice to yourself and you have regard for your materials, you will achieve beauty as a by-product.
"Life and self-expression are both difficult to achieve and often a near failure is surely better than a mechanical and dull perfection. The best people, like the best work, sometimes have grave faults."
He is a strong believer in the virtue of planning.
"The more laboured a finished work looks the less effort has been put into the plans. The more effort which goes into the plans, the more effortless the results."
Asked to name his own heroes he picks two men. The first is Edward Johnston, a craftsman brought up under the influence of William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement.
"Johnston spent years studying the work of the old monks and their bib¬lical illustrations. He died in the 1940s. He was the father of modern calligraphy."
The second is more of a surprise though it accords with leuan Rees" admiration for lively minds.
"Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb. He had such an inventive mind. I'd have loved to have met him."

Reprinted from an article by David Fielding in Carmarthenshire Life