Colourful life of 100-year-old artist who's never used a paint brush

Acclaimed artist Glenys Cour is just weeks away from her 101st birthday and cannot believe her good fortune.

She has built her long and vibrant life around her passion for colour, met the love of her life along the way and even counted the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as a friend.

She is still painting every day at her home in Mumbles overlooking Swansea Bay.

Glenys has never used a paint brush, instead preferring the "immediacy" of working oil paint with torn pieces of fabric and her fingers.

"It's exciting, it's terribly exciting, I love it," she said.

"Colour is the most important thing, certainly in my work as well as in my life."

She said her career as a painter, printmaker, collage and stained-glass artist and teacher meant she mixed with the "intelligentsia of Swansea".

As well as Dylan Thomas, who she fondly recalls as a "really naughty boy", her social circle included composer Dan Jones, poet Vernon Watkins, painter Ceri Richards and sculptor Ranald Cour who she would go on to marry.

This "pretty hectic" social life she enjoyed as an adult could not be further from the experience of her childhood years.

Born in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, in 1924, the then Glenys Carthew was an only child and the daughter of a colliery manager.

Her father's job meant the family moved around the south Wales valleys seven times in total, living in a series of manager's houses set apart from the workers.

During the Depression of the 1930s, the disparity between her relatively comfortable existence and that of the workers and their families left her isolated from other children.

"The circumstances of my father being a manager in a colliery meant you didn't make friends," she said.

She recalled walking behind some terraced houses and hearing a group of children playing and pretending to be her.

"They were playing school and I heard them say 'now I'm Glenys Carthew'," she said.

"And I realised I was posh, I didn't know... it was shattering actually."

But at home, her imagination was fuelled by the books her father would read to her and she began making up her own fairy stories that she would tell to her classmates.

"When I think of it now I must have been very odd," she laughed.

She would also spend hours drawing on paper her father would bring home from work and discovered a passion for creating new colours with watercolour paints.

Becoming an artist was "inevitable", she said, and she flourished at Cardiff School of Art, where she was taught by celebrated painter Ceri Richards.

Richards is regarded as one of the most important British artists of the 20th Century.

"He opened my eyes, he was wonderful, he taught me how to see," she said.

After college, she took a teaching position in Fishguard, living with her grandmother and aunt, but it wasn't long before she moved to Swansea to take a job as an art teacher at Glanmor Girls School.

She began attending an evening classes in life drawing at Swansea College of Art, and it was here she met her husband, the sculptor Ronald Cour, who was lecturing there.

She was lovestruck the moment she met him.

"The funny thing that stood out was the fact he had beautiful hands and anyway, I fancied him," she said with a glint in her eye.

She decided to hide in the ladies' toilets so she could speak to him as he left the building at the end of the day.

"I waited until he came level with the door and I opened the door and bumped into him," she laughed.

"We walked down the stairs together and he said to me 'would you like to come for a drink?'."

They headed to the now demolished Bush Hotel on Swansea's High Street.

It was to be her first time in the pub and also the first time she met Dylan Thomas, a schoolfriend of her new beau.

"I discovered the best place to meet people when you didn't know anybody was the pub," she said.

"I met all the intelligentsia of Swansea really."

At the age of 25, she married Ronald, who was 10 years her senior.

"We had a pretty hectic social life, a wonderful social life, it was a rich social life, music, theatre, everything," she said.

"I loved it all, I was so lucky and I adored my husband.

"He was always over my shoulder telling me I was wonderful."

The couple had a daughter, Jane, and both their careers went from strength to strength.

But in May 1978, Glenys' world was torn apart when Ronald died suddenly and unexpectedly, aged just 63.

"I didn't think I could live," she said.

"Honestly, I really thought I couldn't live without him."

She took a week off work and then threw herself into painting.

"I don't think I'd have got through it if I hadn't," she said.

"I immersed myself in it.

"I go through that door and forget everything."

Almost five decades on, Ronald remains a huge part of her life and she confessed she still speaks to him.

Her living room is adorned with black and white photos of him and his sculptures.

After losing Ronald, she entered a period of vital creativity and spent three decades teaching at Swansea College of Art.

"I love people and I love teaching," she said.

"To be standing up in front of a group of students and trying to open their eyes, there's nothing more thrilling than that."

Today her artworks have found their way into numerous private and public collections and she has been exhibited widely in Europe and the US.

In 2014, a major retrospective of her work was held at Swansea's Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.

To what does she attribute her longevity?

"I think it's the fact that I'm working, I'm sure of it, it's a necessity," she said.

"I could never get over my good luck for the whole of my life, I've been blessed.

"I've had a fantastic life. I really, really mean it."