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In the second week of January we buried the painter Peter Prendergast in a wicker coffin in the Bethesda graveyard where he had chosen to lie. A year before, a young student at Coleg Menai where Peter taught had been killed in a car accident and was buried there. Peter had chosen the place then. He had been unwell for much of 2006, a year in which he had experienced unparalleled successes. His retrospective exhibition had opened at Oriel Ynys Môn and had toured to Swansea, Cardiff and Machynlleth. Seren had published a collection of critical essays about his work, The Painter’s Quarry. A 30-minute filmed profile with the same title was shown on BBC2 Wales TV. He had sold a number of works and had signed a contract with the Cork Street gallery Messum’s. An exhibition there with his old friend Len Tabner was scheduled for December 2007, with a solo show the following year. It is hoped that the 2007 exhibition will still go ahead. Then, on January 14th, on a Sunday morning walk with his wife in Llanberis, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

   Peter Prendergast was born in 1946 in Abertridwr in the Aber valley, in what is now Mid-Glamorgan. His father was a miner of Irish Catholic stock. While his brother passed the eleven-plus and went on to the grammar school, Peter was consigned to the local secondary modern where he excelled mainly at games; he must have seemed destined to follow his father into the mines. However, he was fortunate to be taught by a remarkable art master: Gomer Lewis had survived years as a POW in Java at the hands of the Japanese. At the back of the art room Lewis would work at his own memories of those horrors. He recognised the talent of Peter Prendergast and brought him to the attention of the County Art Advisor and accomplished painter, Leslie Moore. With Moore’s support, though with no academic qualifications, Peter Prendergast entered the foundation course at Cardiff School of Art in 1962 and two years later progressed from there to the Slade, winning the Nettleship Prize for Figure Painting in 1967.

   Later, he was aware that his expressionist painting would be attributed, inevitably, to the influence of Auerbach, his tutor; but he was insistent that his bold colours, often held within structures by thick black lines, had been present in his work from his schooldays.

   He entered the University of Reading in 1968 to do the MA course with Terry Frost and Claude Rogers: he needed a degree to realise his ambition to combine the necessity of a more permanent teaching post and his vocation as an artist.

   In 1969 Peter and his wife Lesley moved to Bethesda, eventually to live in a house close to where the German immigrant Martin Bloch had painted the quarry workers on his visits to Wales between 1947 and 1954. He taught for a period at the local school and then at Coleg Menai, but over the next decade the quarry would provide him with an epic subject. The large oil in which that series culminated was acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1984. It is a vision of what Prendergast thought to be ‘the largest man-made hole in Europe’ as an almost cubist rendition of greens, ochres, blues and black.

   His first prestigious contract was with Agnew’s in London, who were also showing his friend Len Tabner; his relationship with that gallery lasted for a number of years, culminating in an exhibition which toured from London through Wales in 1993 and 1994. Work was included from his earlier career, but the more recent paintings on canvas and paper of the Nant Ffrancon Valley were outstanding. The Foreword to that tour’s impressive catalogue was written by Sister Wendy Beckett, who described Prendergast as ‘a superb colourist and a master of form’; in front of his paintings, she thought, ‘It is very tempting to just to ask viewers to stand in silence… and let the music “sing to the spirit”.’

   Peter’s final series of works took him to the coastline of Anglesey, and his determination to broaden his subject-matter and capture the energy of the Irish Sea pounding those cliffs produced fine works such as The sea at Twr Ellin, Wild Sea and Below the Sea. Despite being unwell, last October Peter had bravely given a talk to the Contemporary Art Society of Wales in Cardiff. I had discussed with him recently the Society’s project of a seventieth anniversary Gregynog Press book and portfolio of prints and he had enthusiastically agreed to contribute an original print. We have lost a major artist working at the height of his powers.