Steel by Peter Cronin

7th - 28th November

Part of The Celebration of Welsh Contemporary Painting

"When the blast furnaces at Port Talbot closed on September 30th 2024, the world changed, not only for those made redundant, but in a smaller way for me too. Once you’ve spent years in a steelworks of this scale, it stays with you; Steel stays in your blood. It was the prompt that I needed to start painting all those images etched into my memory, I could feel the heat, I could still smell the coke ovens and the sulphur from the slag of the blast furnaces. I was in awe of the place for twenty years.

So using sketches and photographs from my time in the works, alongside images generously loaned from other photographers and steelworkers, I have made this body of work. It stands as my response to a world that filled two decades of my life. Were they the best years?. No, my paint brush has given me that. But they were years spent at hard, dangerous work, with men and women that I have nothing but the highest respect for, and I shall remember it, and them for the rest of my days because like I said. “Steel, it stays in your blood”

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