Contemporary Art Gallery in the Cotswolds

“A LIFE IN THE DAY OF”
10 September – 30 September2026
80th Birthday Celebration Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Etchings from Wales, Tuscany, and the Cotswolds.

In early Autumn the evening often falls soft and unobtrusive. I have always loved this time of the year. A time of comfortable old shoes and warm jumpers, a time for reflection, a time to put aside the tyranny of urgency. Just recently I have found myself gazing at the wonderful coloured carpets of fallen leaves- you know- one of those moments of passionless lucidity- when it occurred to me that does it really matter if what we remember really happened? Or does it matter that it mattered enough to be remembered?

“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “One can’t believe impossible things”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice”, said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day – why,
sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

That, in a nutshell, captures the essence of my first real memories as a 1946 Baby Boomer Growing up in the Afan Valley before the end of rationing!
Encouraged by my parents into a world of the imagination, I heard and later read great stories of derring -do from the Coral Islands, Robinson Crusoe, The adventures of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Kipling. Rider Haggard, and Fenimore Cooper’s vivid tales of adventure amongst the exotic tribes of the great plains and forests of Africa and the Americas. Then it was ‘North with Nansen’ and south with Scott of the Antarctic. I soon realized that for my father, in particular, all the words were like notes of music- he liked to hear and see how they fell on the page. For him, music too, particularly Opera, was a gateway to history and live cultural experience.

I roamed the hills above our village, discovering secret cwms and the many unknown tributaries, creeks and springs all feeding the mighty Afan River. I became, trapper, cavalry scout, pirate and intrepid buffalo hunter. Indeed, so vivid was the experience that on one occasion I can, actually remember running home to peer from behind the curtains in my bedroom at what I believed was a Sioux raiding party thundering down the path from the old football pitch high on the mountain behind my house!

Later, from the Eagle, Tiger, Hotspur, etc, Dan Dare, the flying aces Battler Britton and Braddock joined the list of characters feeding my imagination.
The fact is that through an almost constant exposure to stories of all kinds; written, spoken, fluent, lyrical, poetic, rough, riddled, rolling multisyllabic language, along with an only child’s capacity for patient observation the “What if”, “Why is that then”, “Really”, “Never,” conversations at the washday garden fence, street corners and shopping queues at the CO-OP, I have always been collecting what, , in effect, is my personal treasury of characters who have tried to cope in their own unique way with the complexities of the human condition.
Ah, if we but let our dreams fly. The sound of memory is like the murmur of a fountain on its way to a pond of exile gorging on air and fantasy.

David L Carpanini, 2026.