The link between a remote cottage in the Welsh hills and super rock band Led Zeppelin is being celebrated in a new art exhibition in Machynlleth, which opens on Saturday.
Band members Robert Plant and Jimmy Page wrote most of their seminal third album at Bron Yr Aur, near Corris, which is the focus of paintings produced by American artist Jim Stallings in homage to Led Zeppelin.
Bron Yr Aur was the unlikely setting for the legendary rockers to write many of their hits in the 1970s, including parts of Stairway to Heaven, one of the most famous songs of all time.
Stallings received permission from Bron yr Aur’s current owners, Scott and Ruth Roe, to produce the first commissioned paintings of the cottage. What began as a simple request for the use of photographs quickly developed into “The Bron yr Aur Project”. Scott described the whole thing as “organically coming together”.
For the first time since Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s famed visit to the cottage some 40 years ago, an effort is being made to honour the quiet little cottage.
Jim renders his subjects with a vivid impasto effect. Using a limited palette of colours, he works in both oil and acrylic applying the paint with knives, brushes and even paper towels, preferring to use pure colour from the tube with little mixing on the palette.
Jim Stallings’ Bron Yr Aur Project exhibition will be on show at The Museum of Modern Art, Wales (MOMA, WALES) in Machynlleth from April 25 to June 20. The museum is open from Monday to Saturday from 10am to 4pm.
Works by other artists from The Bron Yr Aur Project are also on display in a separate exhibition at the Owain Glyndŵr Centre in Machynlleth.
Stallings, who hails from Macon, Georgia, began painting in 1997 and the popularity of his work turned a hobby into a full time career.
Represented by galleries in Georgia and Tennessee, his work is in corporate and private collections in the United States, Canada and the UK.
