The Tutor
Tutor, Anthony Griffiths is a professional sculptor and a qualified teacher. His portrait work can be seem in the Houses of Parliament, Southampton City Centre and Melbourne, Australia.
About Anthony Griffiths
I trained at the Bournville School of Art (Foundation Course) and Bath Academy of Art (BA Hons) in the early 1980’s where I studied how to carve wood, model clay, cast in plaster and try other sculpture techniques. From 1986, I worked as a commercial wood carver specialising in traditional interior architectural carving (fireplaces, doorways, mirror surrounds and restoration work) for Ray Coggins interiors. In 1995 I moved from Wiltshire to Somerset, to the old primary school in Walton. This became a permanent workshop, exhibition and living space for me. Apart from woodcarving I like walking, swims in the sea (all year round), gardening and meditation.
Sculpture & Woodcarvings
In the 1980’s and early 1990’s I worked mainly from life and carved a series of life sized seated and over life sized groups of figures in beech and cedar of Lebanon wood. I completed several figurative and portrait commissions in both wood and bronze. From 1986 to 2007, as a commercial carver, I recreated 18th & 19th century classical style carvings.
The flower carvings started in 1993. Interestingly, whatever I was trying to express with the figure carvings, I found much easier to convey via the flower pieces. They seemed to have a visceral quality, lacking in the figures. They could also be languid and full of life. By the end of the 1990’s the flower carvings developed into a more simplified and abstract style, and in early 2000 they became completely abstract, reduced to looping and repetitive forms and movement. Within a short time, I found that what I had wished to carve in wood was no longer possible, as the forms had become too thin and brittle to carve. So, I started to model the sculptures in wax and casted them in bronze and aluminium using the traditional “lost wax” process. Initially, I made a small bronze furnace in a shed in the garden and used the kiln for firing the moulds (to remove the wax). Later, I made a much larger furnace and kiln and worked from a barn in a nearby field. This continued until 2007.
My work has been exhibited at the Beaux Arts gallery in Bath and in Gloucester Cathedral. I have also fulfilled commissions for the Houses of Parliament, Conock Manor, Devizes, and for Highgrove, where I created a pair of carved benches for HRH the Prince of Wales. I also sculpted the former Southampton Mayor John Le Fleming which can be seen in Southampton’s Castleway
Pembrokeshire, Wales
Throughout our childhood my brother and I would accompany our mother to St Davids for a week every Easter holiday, where she supervised a marine study field trip for teacher training students from Birmingham (where we lived). This developed our love for Pembrokeshire. For 16 years my brother lived and taught landscape painting classes around the St Davids peninsular.
Since 2014, I have divided my week between teaching in Walton and living in Stackpole, creating a carving workshop.
In 2017 I opened ‘The Clay Room’ and ‘The Carving Room’, a purpose built workshop in Stackpole village, near Pembroke in West Wales.