Kyffin Williams Paintings Come Alive: ‘It’s Like You’re in One’

In the first room, the singer Sir Bryn Terfel narrates Williams' life story in a bilingual presentation. Terfel is himself an avid collector of Williams' work.

The second room is the "projection cave". Williams' farmers and sheepdogs walk through rugged landscapes, cattle and waterfalls move, and waves seem to crash around the walls and floor. A Welsh chamber-folk string trio provides the music.

The third room holds an electronic version of a Williams self-portrait that visitors can touch. It lets them feel how thickly he applied paint, and the moustache is especially dense. Williams used the impasto technique, laying paint on so heavily that it stands out in three dimensions.

Why the library

The library holds the largest collection of Williams' work in the world. It bought its first two pieces in 1950, soon after he left the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Morfudd Bevan, the library's art curator, said it paid £15 for an oil painting of Cader Idris and £7.10 for an ink and wash drawing of Tre'r Ceiri on the Llŷn Peninsula. Original work by Williams now sells for tens of thousands of pounds.

Williams, born on Anglesey in 1918, died in September 2006. He left the library more than 1,200 works on paper, about 200 oil paintings, more than 300 original prints and his personal archive.

Building the show

The library received grants of £500,000 for the project. It hopes to bring in a new audience, including more young people. Rhodri Llwyd Morgan, the library's chief executive, said the experience is part of a strategy "to be more popular, more appealing and that's our aim".

Carys Ifan, the library's director of experience, said: "It's by no means a traditional exhibition." She said visitors "go on a journey, literally moving through three rooms".

Focal Studios worked with another company, leo&hyde, to animate the paintings. Outten said high-fidelity scans of the originals helped. The team built a 3D model of Williams' farmer and dog, then used puppeteering techniques to make them move.

Outten said the experience differs from virtual reality. "You can hold the hand of your child, you can sit there with your grandmother or your friend and you experience it together," he said.

The team spent months living with the paintings from the library's stores, working out how to keep Williams' palette-knife texture on screen. Some choices were delicate, such as how to make his farmers walk and which colours to use as the sun sets into the sea. "We felt the pressure," Outten said. "You want to be true to his life, his work, his methods, and he's not around to give us any feedback."