Two Brecon-based artists with unusual and very different backgrounds are sharing a two-man exhibition of paintings in the Tower Gallery, Crickhowell.

David Goff Eveleigh is widely known throughout Wales and over the border as Goffee the Clown, and after 25 years of appearing in clown shows at Glastonbury Festival he was honoured with the Golden Nose award as the festival’s longest-serving clown. He has also gained fame as a creator of fire events and as a land artist designing labyrinths and mazes, as well as making sculptures from steel and wicker.

In the last few years he has turned his hand back to painting – an art he first explored when he left school 40 years ago and studied at an art college in Bristol. He left art college to join the circus and over the years became a leading circus and festival clown, but says he has always been fascinated by colour and always been involved in making art in various forms. His paintings on show in the Tower Gallery include brightly painted oils inspired by celebrations in India, a continent which he has visited many times. Unable to travel there during the pandemic he has turned his eye to the Brecon landscape.

Goffee, as he is widely known, lives just below Trallong Common and close to his house are fields which are now home to a spectacular herd of longhorned cattle, busy at present producing beautiful calves. The cattle have been introduced by Gavin and Vina Hogg of nearby Penpont House and Goffee has got up close and painted them with a background of the Brecon Beacons.

His portraits of these beasts are dramatic and memorable. The artist has a close association with Penpont House, having created the Green Man maze which is a feature of Penpont Gardens. A few years ago he produced, in the woodland beside the maze, a dramatic open-air performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Like the Longhorn paintings his images of boats in West Country harbours are equally fresh and bold. His son is a boatbuilder in Devon and provides his father with many picture opportunities. The artist’s fascination with romance and with travel is evident in his picture making.

As an ‘elemental’ theatre artist, directing and creating fire performances and fire structures, his performance art led him around the world for several decades, taking his unique creativity to Portugal, Mexico, Eastern Europe, Sweden, North America and Ireland as well as throughout the British Isles.

David Goff Eveleigh is a guest artist in the Tower Gallery and is sharing the exhibition space with a founder member of the gallery, Robert Macdonald, who lives close by him on the Penpont estate.

Robert’s background is equally unusual for a painter. He first trained as a journalist in New Zealand and worked in Fleet Street before turning his back on daily journalism in the 1970s and going as a mature student to the painting school of the Royal College of Art.

Many of his years as a journalist were spent writing on foreign affairs. His travels took him to visit the dictator Idi Amin in Uganda and to China shortly before Chairman Mao’s death and he toured Arabia with the British Foreign Minister James Callaghan.

During this time he was also deeply involve in painting and the current exhibition includes a number of oil paintings produced while he was still working in Fleet Street. They are mostly portraits of people he met at this time, none of them well-known, though a painting of a Green Man with foliage sprouting out of his head is possibly a linkup with Goffee’s Green Man maze at Penpont.

Another connection with his colleague’s exhibition is his paintings of farms and cattle – not the Penpont longhorns but a herd of more run-of-the-mill Friesian cattle in Llangynidr. Robert’s father was a country veterinary surgeon which may help explain his preoccupation in much of his recent work with farm life and farm animals.

The exhibition continues until Sunday, May 22. The gallery is open from Thursday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm.