For as long as he can remember, Neyland-born Bob Reeves has shared a close and all-embracing relationship with the natural world around him.

 As a child, he’d hunt tadpoles, gather cockles, dive for tallies made from broken pieces of china and follow the flight of the seabirds that nested around the Cleddau.  The images he observed were then captured by his little hands using watercolours which his mother had bought him from the local shop.

“Painting or drawing the things that I saw was something that I’ve always had to do,” he tells The Pembrokeshire Herald.

“I didn’t know whether I was any good at art, and to be perfectly honest, I still don’t.  But I’ve always had to reach out for a pencil, a pen, paints or some charcoal to try and capture all those things I’ve felt.”

And this is what possibly  makes Reeves one of Pembroekshire’s most powerful and enigmatic artists.  He doesn’t simply paint an image, but uses it to convey the overwhelming emotion that the image originally prompted. 

“People are always telling me how wonderful it must be to shut myself away in my studio and paint.  ‘What a lovely, relaxing hobby it must be,’ they say.  But my God, it’s intense, and it’s that intensity that invariably makes me feel bad tempered.

“I’m conscious of the earth as a living thing and it’s this sense of power, this great surge of energy which I then want to transfer onto my paintings.”

Anyone who has viewed Reeves’ work will know just how intensely he captures the all-embracing natural energy that the earth contains.

“I suppose it’s probably an advantage that I never went to art college and haven’t had a single art lesson since I was a 14-year-old pupil at Pembroke Grammar School.

“I’m a free spirit and this means that I break a lot of rules when I work.”

Bob’s first broken rule came as a three-year-old toddler growing up at the family home in Kensington Road, Neyland.

“I decided to draw a teddy bear on my bedroom wall using a red crayon, and when my mother saw it, she didn’t know whether to give me a row or praise me.  But it must have looked pretty good because the next thing she did was go out to the shop and buy me a little tin of watercolours.”

As a schoolboy, Bob used watercolours to paint all his technical biology drawings and he was renowned by his teachers and fellow students alike for the caricature drawings and portraits he drew of them using a pen. And it goes without saying that his sense of humour often ignited his teachers’ ire.

After leaving school, he spent a short time working for the Civil Service before joining the police force as a constable.  But then, on October 21, 1966, Bob was involved in one of the most catastrophic tragedies ever to hit Wales. The Aberfan disaster.

“I was there within eight hours of it happening, and I stayed there for the following eight days,” he said.

“The things I saw and the grief that I could feel all around me, has played hell with me ever since.

“I was 22 at the time, I was a young father, and I have to say that this wasn’t a happy time in my life.  Yes, I’ve always had the ability to paint and to draw, but this shut it all down.  Aberfan stretched my emotions to something which I didn’t think it was possible to feel.”

Listening to Bob speak about Aberfan, it soon becomes clear that the trauma he encountered remains with him to this day.

“It wasn’t until I left the police force and started working at the oil refinery [in Milford Haven], that I started painting again,” he continues.  “And I suppose that this was when my work began to evolve more into what it has become today.  Whatever that raw emotion may be whenever I see a landscape or some other natural thing that makes me feel its power, then this is the raw emotion that I want to get across in my work.”

His paintings display an acute empathy of colour and an intense sense of movement and they have been sold to buyers in the United States of America, Peru, Canada, Australia and throughout the UK including one which is currently displayed in Whitehall, London.

“I’ve yet to go and see it,” he says. “Yes, it’s nice that a part of Pembrokeshire has been taken to Whitehall, but I’m not particularly bothered about going to see it. That’s not what I’m about.

“I’m here to feel the power around me and try to convey it through my paints.”

This month a collection of Bob Reeves’ work can be viewed at a Christmas exhibition that takes place at the Waterfront Gallery, Milford Haven.  The exhibition opens on November 23 and will continue until Christmas.