Collection: George Little : Painter : Swansea (1927 -2017)

“My paintings are of landscapes and marinescapes particularly in those where industry takes place or has taken place. These areas with their colour, pattern and texture stimulate me as a painter.”

George Little was born in 1927 in Danygraig, Swansea where his earliest visual memories were of looking down on to the then constantly busy docks, full of ships with their multicoloured smoke stacks and the dockside bristling with coal hoists, cranes, engines, wagons, sheds, buoys and capstans. He started his art training as a sculptor at Swansea College of Art on his return from military service but, having seen his paintings, the principal KW Hancock and the Swansea painter Will Evans suggested that he took up painting. At the end of his studies in Swansea he was awarded a bursary to go to the Ruskin School of Drawing of Oxford University. After two years at the Ruskin he started a forty-one year career in teaching beginning at Oxford Street Secondary School in Swansea then Barnsley School of Art, Swansea College of Art and finally the University of Wales Swansea, all of which he found very rewarding and with the fortunate luxury of time to also paint and exhibit.

His subject matter as a painter was often based on the industrial environment in which he grew up and his later work reflected the decline and eventual decay of those areas as heavy industry has been replaced. He also worked in other industrial areas such as the Welsh valleys, Cornwall and the North of England where he could still find the remnants of the past in the dereliction of factories, mines and dockyards from which he constructed his own and very individual interpretations of the colours, shapes and textures that he saw there. He found similar inspiration in the colours and patterns of landscapes and marinescapes, especially in Wales and in Brittany. From the inception of an idea, the final work may have taken as long as three years to complete and many of the images used in his industrial paintings were from studies made as early as the 1950's.