Article by Celestria Noel, October 1999

"GOING TO THE CHAPEL"

Stumbling upon an overgrown Nonconformist meeting house with views into a picture-book Welsh valley and beyond over tree and sheep dotted hills, Jonathan Myles-Lea paused for a while to live the life of a recluse.  

When the artist Jonathan Myles-Lea first saw the chapel at Cefn-Vaynor in the mid Nineties, it was so overgrown with ivy that he couldn't see the door.  Having hacked his way through, he found himself in a long room with a pulpit at one end, and some overturned box pews and hymn books lying where they had been left when the building was abandoned in 1946.  Four miles into the hills from the nearest village, Cefn-Vaynor is the site of the dwelling of the sixth-century St Bueno and of an even older standing stone.  The low, white chapel probably dates from the eighteenth century and was used as a Non-conformist meeting house.  The place has a magic, which Jonathan sensed immediately.  Its puritanical simplicity and remote situation appealed to him, partly because it was so different from the grand houses he was painting and partly because there were no distractions. He stayed for three years before returning to work in London.

Jonathan studied history of art and architecture at the University of London, then worked in television but always wanted to paint.  His chance came when Cornelia Bayley let him stay as Plas Teg, her Jacobean house in North Wales, in return for lending her a hand with the restoration work.  She asked him to pain a picture of the house and the garden and the successful results encouraged him to make it his profession. His big breakthrough came when Roy Strong and his wife Julia Trevelyan Oman asked him to paint their biographical garden, the Laskett in Herefordshire.

Jonathan's pictures typically take a bird's-eye view of the subject with details portrayed in a series of cartouches.  'I rediscovered a formula used by Kip in his early eighteenth-century engravings whereby the plan and elevation of the house and its environs are included.  I like that almost naive look.'  He plays with perspective, sometimes using it conventionally at the top of a painting to show views of distant hills and fields as they appear from, say, a top window, sometimes ignoring the rules so the house looks like a paper cutout  Recent commissions include two views of Burghley House, one of which shows the vast roofscape, the courtyard and the elaborate clock tower build in 1558.  Simon and Lady Victoria Leatham are shown walking their dogs in the garden and the artist himself, dressed in the black suit and white shirt he habitually wears to paint, can just be seen at his easel in the corner.

'Gardens are now my passion,' he says, 'and there is a real purpose in painting a garden.  It can simply vanish in six months.  A change of ownership, even a change of gardener and things disappear,' he says.

The chapel at Cefn-Vaynor had to be completely restored, with a new slate roof and new windows.  Jonathan worked solidly for up to three months at a time, to the accompaniment of recordings of liturgical music.  During the winter he was often snowed in for several weeks.  He limewashed the main room, leaving a slightly flaky finish, and laid concrete to create the floor: 'I wanted to have a floor you could put anything on without worrying, you could bring a tree into the house or build a snowman.'  He kept the red and black tiles in the sitting room, adding a worn Turkish rug.  'You want to manipulate the environment as little as possible, just to tidy things up.  I tried to scratch away at paint surfaces to see what was there before and then not match them exactly but pick something which toned.

He stored the hymn books in the base of the pulpit, and kept the old stove and original stairs; he even asked the builders not to take down a swallow's nest indoors in case one day the building was left empty again and the birds came back.  In his kitchen he used a chipped old sink bought locally for £10, and found his bath, discarded from a gamekeeper's cottage, under a hedge.  It just fitted through the door and the bathroom itself had to be constructed around it.  Some of his finds came from further afield - a brass church chandelier from Holland, for instance.  In the kitchen he uncovered a huge fireplace, while for the sitting room he mixed a warm straw-coloured paint to harmonize with the mortar in the inglenook. The finished house constantly buzzed with creativity as visiting artist and musician friends worked away - it has excellent acoustics.

Jonathan's work has lately taken him to Holland and he has had to leave Cefn-Vaynor.  However, what he describes a 'its terrifying and inspiring' landscape will stay with him and he hopes that the orchard he planted around the ancient standing stone will survive.

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