Bonnie Tyler is back in Skewen, across the whole end wall of a building, with half her face in colour and half in black and white.
The mural has gone up in the village she grew up in, four months after her death. Coedffranc Town Council asked for it, and artist Jenks took five days to paint it.
The split down the middle of her face is deliberate. The black and white half is the memorial, Jenks said, and the colour half is the singer who lives on through her music.
To her left a cherry tree in full pink blossom leans over green fields, with a sunrise behind it and a dark red heart in the sky carrying her name in white script. The fields are Skewen Park, he said.
Beside her shoulder is a heraldic shield, and in the corner the artist’s tag.
Jenks, whose real name is Steve Jenkins, said he was “honoured and very privileged” to be asked to paint a memorial wall to Bonnie Tyler in her home village.
The five days had “felt worth every second for this to appear”, he said, thanking the town council and the people who had stopped to say kind things while the wall took shape. “It’s been a really nice wall to paint.”
Gaynor Hopkins of Skewen: waved off from the railway line, married at St John’s
She was born Gaynor Hopkins on 8 June 1951, a coal miner’s daughter, one of six children in a council house in Skewen, and sang first in chapel.
When a London talent scout sent her up to Paddington to record a demo, her mother, brother and sister stood beside the track at Skewen and waved madly as the train went past. Roger Bell, the man who found her, told that story at her funeral.
She married Robert Sullivan at St John’s Church in the village in 1973. Fifteen years ago Neath Port Talbot made her a Freewoman of the borough.
She died in hospital in Portugal on 8 July, aged 75, two months after emergency surgery. Her councillor in Skewen, Helen Ceri Clarke, said at the time that she had always said Skewen, rather than Neath, was where she was from.
After the service at Swansea Minster on 17 August, the cortege came through the village on its way to a private family service, past streets already lined with people.
Jenks: Colin Jones last month, Bonnie Tyler this month
The Skewen wall is the second big face Jenks has put up in a fortnight. Last month he painted boxer Colin Jones on the wall of Penyrheol Boxing Club, the Gorseinon club where “The Punch” started out.
He got into murals painting NHS tributes while furloughed from a factory job in lockdown, and went full time as the requests kept coming. His walls since include a village mural in Pontyates designed with its schoolchildren, a five-panel seafront piece in his home town of Llanelli that he paid for himself, and a tribute in Port Talbot to Michael Sheen’s father Meyrick.
Not all of them have lasted. His Brunel mural in Briton Ferry was painted over in July after the building’s owner objected.
Skewen lined its streets for her in August. Now it has her on a wall, in colour on one side and black and white on the other, with the park painted in behind.
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