I've been so busy of late I haven't had time to write about my Dylan Thomas neon installation which went up on the Kardomah Cafe in Park Street, Swansea on October 19th, a week before the centenary of Dylan's birth.
The installation, which is Locws International's final commission for 2014 as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary, is an upper-case neon text, in white, which reads: 'Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, and girls...'
As many will know, the line is taken from Dylan's radio broadcast Return Journey. In the broadcast Dylan returns to Swansea in search of his former self growing up in the town. We find him at one stage in the Kardomah Cafe with his friends, putting the world to rights. They talk about 'music and poetry and painting and politics'. They talk about 'communism, symbolism, Bradman, Braque'. And they talk about 'Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, and girls...'.
This last line is the best. It is Dylan at his most exuberant,and I thought it would be a nice touch to run it along the Park Street facade of the Kardomah. Thus, in Dylan's centenary year, Return Journey returns to one of the places that inspired it. I knew the site of the Kardomah had chanaged since Dylan's day, but the important things surely was that the name remained - Kardomah, my 'Home Sweet Homah' as Dylan put it in a letter to his friend Charles Fisher.
As I mentioned in a previous blog about another of my neon installations, you need a lot of support and expertise on a job like this, and it was amply forthcoming in Swansea. To Gordon Dalton at Locws lnternational, to Marcus and Juliet Luporini who own the Kardomah, to Nick Malyon of NeonNeon who made the text, to John Ski who installed it, to Kevin and Tony of KC Electrical (Wales) Ltd who prepared the electrics, and to Jeff Towns of Dylan's Bookstore who provided general advice, a very big thanks indeed.
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