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Person
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Howard-Jones, Ray
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Description area
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History
Ray Howard-Jones was an acclaimed poet-painter. She was born in England in 1903 of Welsh parents, but was brought up in Wales and lived and worked there for most of her life. She had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Wales, England, Scotland and Paris. She has works in collections in several institutions in Britain and abroad.
Ray Howard-Jones had a varied and colourful life. She trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where she became a Senior Slade scholar and winner of many prizes as well as the Fine Arts Diploma. She was an Accredited War Artist, working, as the only woman, with the Royal Navy to record the D-Day shipping and the Army and RAF on Coastal Defence. The first year of the war found her organising classical concerts in the Cardiff parks. During this period she and Gomer Llywelyn Jones, the Welsh composer, ran the East Moors theatre in Cardiff. In 1946 she won first place, for that season, at the postgraduate Art College at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, where she worked under James Cowie. In 1949 she embarked on nine years of living and working on the uninhabited island of Skomer, where she produced distinguished botanical and ornithological illustrations. In 1958 she designed and executed a mosaic at Thompson House in Cardiff, and in 1963, one of the few true mosaics executed in this country, in Grange Church, Edinburgh. After this came several years of work in the National Museum of Wales dealing with archaeological reconstruction, for the published works of Sir Cyril Fox and Dr Nash-Williams. She wrote highly-regarded poetry, and was a pioneer of community arts.
Ray Howard-Jones died in 1996.