Butetown History & Arts Centre, 4 Dock Chambers, Bute Street, Cardiff Bay
Opening: Sunday afternoon, 22nd January, 2-4pm

Jack Sullivan (1925-2003) devoted much of his life to painting images of the port city of Cardiff – its characters, its history, its everyday life. Frequent subjects in his paintings are ships, street life in sailor town, multi-ethnic seamen, and forgotten heroes of the two World Wars.

From 1948 to 1955, as a British Transport Policeman, Jack Sullivan walked the beat, often at night, patrolling Cardiff’s Sailor Town. As he strolled through the city streets, he made some 800 sketches – many of them of a colourful world of prostitutes, drunken seamen, gamblers and petty criminals. In the 1980s and 90s, he returned to these sketches and re-worked some of them as oil paintings, setting them in an earlier era when Cardiff was the leading coal-exporting port in the world. A selection of these images is presented in this exhibition.

These are evocative paintings of nightlife in old Cardiff Bay – most of them in shades of blue. They are from Butetown History & Arts Centre’s collection of 518 paintings by the artist.

Curators: Rosanna Denyer, Sian Holley and Glenn Jordan – with Craig Bernard and Mohamed Nabil.

Info: 029 20 256 757; http:// This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The exhibition will run until 18th March 2012.
(click on the venue name for a map with route description)