During the Easter break of his second year at the Royal College of Art, Peter Coker travelled to South Wales at the invitation of his college football teammate, Colin Allen, a student in the Department of Graphic Design. Coker was seeking inspiration for the large scale painting each student was required to produce by the end of the second year of studies. Over the course of his trip in April 1952, Coker visited a different colliery every day, reaching the sites by bus, to a total of around a dozen drawings. These works were the last to be formulated en plein air. In conversation with Andrew Lambirth in 1989, Coker recollected: “During my second year I began to concentrate a lot on still-life, but I also began to feel that the imaginative side of my work was not really developing. I went to Wales, working out of doors in the mining district…After that I started to rely on working from drawings. This was a crucial development…After College it was a question of trying to learn to use my drawings in relation to my paintings and to find a way of collecting the material, finding a system of notation that I could read when back at the studio.” Working from drawings, rather than from life, facilitated an artistic freedom unburdened from fidelity to the scene before his eyes and rather led by innate creativity, rooted in but not chained to reality.

This trio of gouache on paper works, Ferndale, Rhondda, Ystrad, Rhondda, and Dowlais Steel Works, Cardiff, all 1952, form part of the Wales set that also includes two further examples now in the collection of the National Museum Wales. Two scenes look down over the Rhondda Valley, following the sweep of peaks and vales enveloping the mines, whilst the third surveys the plain of the East Moors with rail tracks leading to the Dowlais Works. Whilst it would be easy to read an underlying socio-political message into these works - the young student depicting the industrial heartlands of South Wales – Coker was adamant that such interpretation was baseless. Responding to politically-charged readings of his Butcher’s Shop phase, but equally relevant for the Welsh works, Coker stated: “For me, there was no political or social significance to what we were doing, one just worked on material one found interesting. I kept on my own, going my own way.”

Coker’s interest primarily resides in capturing the effervescent effects of smoke and steam, emitted in a mass of plumes punctuating the industrial vistas. Seeking to express the transient and immaterial spirals hanging in the valleys in painted form, Coker scumbles gouache in white and grey over near monochrome scenes. Paradoxically for an artist associated with monumentality, solidity and heavily worked impasto, Coker argued that “one thing that’s always been a big part of my work is movement, to which is linked my own emotional and technical vitality.” In the Welsh works, Coker attempts not to cement but to convey the fleeting and the ever-changing trails of smoke. Though Coker could never have predicted, these works now represent a compelling historical record of an obsolete industry and a bygone landscape.