A hot evening at the Red Gallery close to trendy Hoxton Square in London saw us setting up to film Molly speaking at the opening of the first exhibition of her paintings for a very long time.

About a hundred of the art glitterati - mostly old friends of hers - gathered in the gallery to hear Molly address them.

Molly Parkin. Photo: BBC Cymru Wales/Anthony Lycett

Picture the scene: an audience peppered with bizarre costumes and hair-dos; Molly, dressed like an Inca High Priestess, standing in front of one of her rudest, most sexually-explicit and fascinating paintings, saying very rude words of welcome. Suddenly, she plunges her fingers into her mouth and removes her false teeth!

Being used only to the phoney, manufactured outrageousness of artists like Tracey Emin and her showbiz ilk, I begin to slide down my chair, not knowing where to put myself. But it's too late to escape. The film director has spotted my discomfort, the camera zooms in on me and I try to brave it out by sitting up straight and smiling what I imagine is an urbane, relaxed smile.

It lasts for no more than a nanosecond before Molly launches into a detailed account of how some of the paintings illustrate the pain she has carried through the decades since she was sexually and emotionally abused by her father.

Her honesty and directness scorches all of us in the room. The silences between her sentences are so profound that the racket of the surrounding streets seems to emanate from some distant parallel universe, like white noise.

Then she says something that makes us roar with laughter and I see the camera crew struggling to maintain an equilibrium that will prevent the footage resembling the recording of a powerful earthquake.

Molly Parkin has a genius for placing raw emotion against iconoclastic humour, just as her paintings place searing yellows against vibrant blues. And she has the timing of the great jazz musicians who were among her closest friends.

Molly Parkin looking at her portrait. Photo: BBC Cymru Wales/Mark Allen

I leave the gallery, realising that I've just been in the presence of someone for whom the description, Performance Art, was invented.

We owe BBC Wales thanks for celebrating this extraordinary product of the Garw Valley: a slip of a girl who stormed the bastions of London's bohemia, charmed its extraordinary defenders with her beauty, intelligence and talent and remained defiantly independent and indefatigably outrageous.

Great Lives featuring Molly Parkin, presented by Kim Howells, can be seen on BBC One Wales on Monday 30 May at 10.15pm. It can also be viewed on the BBC iPlayer for the subsequent seven days after transmission.

When I bump into friends in the street they say, 'Now make sure you include so-and-so... She's such a wonderful painter of landscapes.'

When I interview artists in their studios they say, 'You must feature so-and-so... He continues to be such a powerful influence on all of us...'

When I attend exhibition openings I interpret looks of incomprehension from artists who cannot believe that we have left them out of any series that purports to tell the story of Welsh art over the last 100 years or so.

And who can blame them? I feel, some days, as guilty as the Turner Prize Committee should feel every day for seeming to ignore so much that is brilliant in contemporary British art.

Recently, I watched a programme about the impact of artists who worked in St Ives in Cornwall from the 1940s. Some were born and raised in Cornwall; some relocated there. All of them contributed to creating a widespread acceptance that the paintings and sculpture that emerged from St Ives were the equal of art created in New York, Paris, London or any other creative powerhouse. Their work is housed in museums and galleries across the country but especially in one gallery that opened in 1993, Tate St Ives.

The refurbishment of National Museum Wales' existing galleries and the construction of its new West Wing Gallery in Cardiff will help to exhibit some of the finest art produced in Wales, alongside magnificent international collections like the Davies Bequest. Hopefully, the much-longed-for refurbishment of Swansea's Glynn Vivian Gallery and the modifications to galleries like Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno will assist in this task.

However, if the world is going to talk about art produced in Wales as it has talked about art produced in St Ives, it will require proof that the last century of creativity in Wales has been as vibrant and abundant in the principality as it has been in any part of Britain, including St Ives.

That proof exists, locked away in the vaults of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. We must devise or build the means to exhibit that wonderful proof for the world to see.

Past entries from the Framing Wales series can be seen on BBC iPlayer.

I was always a notoriously bad attender; I'd rather sit in a dentist's chair than have to sit for hours listening to one turgid, cliché-ridden conference speech after another.

So it came as a great relief to be in Llandudno and not to be subjected that particular form of cruel and unusual punishment. Instead, we visited the brand-new, multi-million pound extension to Oriel Mostyn where we filmed contemporary Welsh art expert, Karen MacKinnon. She explained the work of Tim Davies, an exhibitor at the Mostyn gallery and the artist chosen to represent art in Wales at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

For someone like me, about to interview Tim himself, and having spent weeks rediscovering, through the process of filming these programmes, the wealth of art created across the length and breadth of Wales over the last hundred years, Karen's great expertise began filling me with doubts.

She talked with such great energy and commitment. We knew, already, that there were, in Wales, a score of wonderful, influential artists we could easily have featured in our films. But names fell from Karen's lips like machine-gun bullets, ripping through any sense I had that we were doing art in Wales justice.

Mercifully, she had no doubt about the great talents we had interviewed: artists like Mary Lloyd Jones, Joan Baker, Shani Rhys James, Terry Setch, David Nash, Ifor Davies, Charles Burton and Kevin Sinnott. Here's a clip featuring Shani from the programme:

Karen thought it was very helpful that Iwan Bala had spent so much of his time explaining his work to us and that the painter and teacher, Osi Rhys Osmond, had shared ideas about how best to nurture future generations of artists. Experts like Gill Fildes, Kirsten Dunthorne, Barry Plummer, John Smith, Ceri Thomas, Mel and Rhiannon Gooding, Robert Meyrick, Anne Price Owen, Jill Piercey and many others helped us understand how and why artists worked as they did throughout the 20th century and through the first decade of this one. But had we done art in Wales justice?

I am certain that there are many fine artists, working in Wales, to whom we have made no reference. To cover everyone BBC Wales would have needed a series as long as The World At War.

Hopefully, we have reminded all those who consider the visual arts to be important that there has been art produced in Wales over the last 100 years that stands comparison with art produced anywhere in the world. That is a fact, not a nebulous assertion to be used in some wider political debate. It should give Welsh artists all of the confidence and encouragement they need to continue creating.

The final episode of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 17 March, at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

We were due to film him the following morning for the fourth film in our series but, far from looking like he ought to have been preserved in one of the museum's glass cases, alongside a Bronze Age hunter or a Victorian milkman, he was probably the snappiest dresser in a room swimming with well-heeled Welsh crachach.

He wore a long jacket you couldn't buy, even in Wales's finest gentlemen's outfitters. It was styled half-way between Darth Vader's cloak and the hand-stitched, velvet creations sported by the flashiest, best-paid Teds in the Aberdare of my youth. This was someone who reminded me that artists are supposed to look different. They are supposed to have style and verve. Ifor has it in shovelfuls: no-less than you'd expect from an artist who has worked and exhibited around the world since the 1960s.

Ifor has a large studio in a converted grain-store in Penarth. Travel due north on the A470 and you come to another conversion serving as an artist's studio, this time a cavernous former chapel in Blaenau Ffestiniog. It houses the sought-after wooden sculptures of David Nash. So sought-after, in fact, that we arrived to film him shortly after crates of them had just been shipped-off to art dealers in Germany. Many of the rest, he explained, were being exhibited at Britain's premier sculpture show, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield.

North of Bridgend, our film crew invaded a studio in another remarkable chapel conversion, nestling in a former mining valley that now resembles a glorious wooded Alpine glen. Here we filmed Kevin Sinnott, born down the road in Sarn, painting his huge, life-affirming canvases and giving us his personal variation on a theme common to the lives of so many artists connected with Wales since the Second World War.

It runs along these lines: talented youngster leaves Wales to study at prestigious London art school, often the Royal College. Talented graduate becomes famous and sought-after artist. Successful artist gets passionate yen to return to Wales, often after becoming parents or after suffering the roller-coaster tendencies of the London art market. Money is scraped together sufficient to convert abandoned churches, schools, farmhouses, barns and warehouses. Drawing, painting and sculpture resume within them.

Crumbling buildings are rescued. New beauty and intellectual vibrancy emerge from them. Wales has its soul enriched.

The final episode of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 17 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Compared with, say, France or Italy, nowhere in Wales is remote from anywhere else in Wales. Geographically, we are the same size as the small American state of New Jersey but with less than a third of New Jersey's population. True, we can experience problems with our physical communications but, theoretically, the place is small enough for ideas, styles and trends to spread in a matter of hours, rather than years.

Almost no-where in Wales is impossibly remote from some of the greatest urban centres and markets of England. Cardiff and Swansea are much closer to London than is Newcastle, Glasgow or Liverpool. Much of north Wales and mid Wales is within convenient driving distances of Manchester and Birmingham.

When Surrealist art began appearing in Britain in the 1930s, Welsh artists saw it and debated it as quickly as artists from any other part of these islands. Indeed, the finest surrealist artist that Britain produced was from the mining village of Dunvant, near Swansea. His name was Ceri Richards and he was nothing less than a phenomenon in the international art world.

We went to Dunvant for the third programme in our series and discovered that Richards had been nurtured in a working class community that valued music and art as highly as it did honesty, hard work and Christianity.

Dunvant was the antithesis of insularity. It was a village excited by creativity and Richards had been part of an extraordinary creative milieu generated by the Swansea School of Art, the town's Glynn Vivian Gallery, the Kardomah Restaurant and Dylan Thomas' favourite pubs.

More than his contemporaries in Swansea, Ceri Richards was influenced by the work of Picasso and Matisse and, in 1962, he represented Britain at the world's foremost artfest, the Venice Biennale, where he was a prizewinner. But he was far from being the only Welsh artists to be influenced profoundly by artists from Europe and beyond.

In the 1940s, for example, young Welsh artists were able to visit the studios of two central European artists who escaped Nazi oppression to settle and work in Wales: Heinz Koppel in Dowlais and Josef Herman in Ystradgynlais. Others, like Kyffin Williams, and a host of talented young Welsh artists, lived in London and other English cities but concentrated the central thrust of their art on Wales and Welsh subjects.

This exchange of influences, ideas and experiences is the story of 20th century art across the developed world. It had as dynamic an influence on Welsh art as it did on the art of New York, Paris, London and St Ives.

Paradoxically, however, we discovered in making this, the third film of our series, that Wales also retained a reputation as a place where remoteness and solitude might be found. There were artists who came to Wales precisely because they sought remote places and what they hoped would be an accompanying simplicity of life.

One of them was Brenda Chamberlain who made the hazardous crossing to Bardsey Island to settle and work there in 1947. Like Chamberlain, other artists sought refuge in the Welsh hills from urban life and produced work of the highest quality.

Hopefully, our film illustrates a simple but important truth: the diversity and richness of art created in Wales, or about Wales, is the result of as complex a mix of personalities, techniques, geographies, ideas and influences as art created anywhere in the world. Perhaps we should be ready to celebrate that truth more often than we do.

Episode three of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 10 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

In our third film, we wanted to continue to illustrate the pivotal role of Ceri Richards from Swansea, who, by the end of World War Two, was a colossus on the British art scene. Our film crew arranged to meet at the house in London belonging to Richards' daughter, Rhiannon, and her husband, Mel Gooding.

Bursting with beautiful art, much of it painted by Rhiannon's father, their house stands on an elegant yet busy thoroughfare through London and is the very antithesis of another thoroughfare that runs north-south, 170 miles due west of London: the railway that joins Treherbert to Cardiff, via Rhondda Fawr and Pontypridd.

Hard to imagine two more different worlds. But, 60 years ago, there was a flow of healthy creative blood between those two thoroughfares. Ceri Richards, Britain's leading surrealist, based in London, was an inspiration to a new generation of young Rhondda artists who used that railway as a moving seminar room.

Each morning in the late 1940s, Charles Burton, Ernie Zobole, Robert Thomas and other young lions caught a train from the Rhondda to attend Cardiff School of Art. When we interviewed Charles Burton he made it clear that, when they were arguing on that train about the relative merits of Ceri Richards and Picasso, the sliding door to their compartment was firmly shut to outsiders.

We decided this needed re-enacting and hired four young drama students to play the parts of the Rhondda artists. They performed beautifully in an ancient carriage hauled by a steam train on the Gwili Railway near Carmarthen. One of them was told by Steve Freer, our director: "When Kim finishes his piece to camera, standing there in the entrance to your carriage, I want you to slide the door, fast and hard, excluding him from your discussions, exactly as the Rhondda Group would have done to some outsider who might have tried to enter their private world."

Concentrating on the task of portraying a brittle young artist of the 1940s, the drama student put down his pencil and waited, tense with volcanic creativity, until I said my bit. Suddenly, with all his might, he slammed the door shut, missing my nose by a fraction. Whether or not the camera picked up the shock on my face at this screen violence, I don't know, and I didn't glance down to see if the drama student was pleased with his performance.

Instead, remembering Steve's instructions, I got a grip and walked out of camera shot, hearing Steve shout "Cut" as directors do when they get anywhere near actors. Only then, as the steam train puffed down the Gwili Valley, did I tentatively check with my index finger that my ample nose was still intact. It was.

Episode three of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 10 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Alone, in the galleries where pictures collected by the Davies sisters hang, I find myself spooked by spectral images reflecting from the framed glass. They are not of me, now well into my sixties, but of me at 16 with my pals from Mountain Ash Grammar School, arguing the merits of this painter against that one, of Van Gogh's wonderful, rain-streaked landscape at Auvers and Cezanne's Provencal Landscape.

I knew, always, that I was so lucky to live within 30 miles of such pictures. Almost half a century has passed since the days when I stuck out my thumb at the top of Penywaun hill, between Hirwaun and Aberdare, hoping for a lift down the valley. Once in the big city, the first stop was Spillers record shop in the Hayes to hear the latest jazz releases. I remember walking from Spillers to the National Museum, clutching Miles Davis' album Milestones. I'd just blown my accumulated pocket-money on buying it. The album cover was a work of art in itself: a stunning photograph of Davis, sporting a shirt so deliciously green that I searched for years, unsuccessfully, to find one like it.

Cardiff, jazz, the impressionist and post-impressionist paintings of the Davies Sisters' Bequest: music and paintings that linked Aberdare and Mountain Ash to New York, Paris and Provence. The combination and links generated energy of such intensity that, a half century later, it still sparked and leapt around those pictures in the National Museum.

Just before we start filming, I try to communicate a little of this, without appearing to be entirely certifiable, to a young art expert who works at the Museum, researching and writing about the paintings. She listens, politely, but I know I'm not getting through. Her incomprehension at much of my babbling makes me begin to wonder how far I should go in front of the camera in trying to explain what this place meant to me as a kid in 1964, hungry for great art.

In the nick of time, I tell myself, 'Hang on, you raving egomaniac, this is about explaining how Ceri Richards, not Kim Howells, was thrilled and inspired when he first saw the Davies Sisters' pictures. This is about how Ceri Richards, in turn, inspired a new generation of artists and how, in turn, that generation passed on the torch to painters and sculptors in Wales.'

Saved then. But even as I did my pieces to camera, out of the corner of my eye I could see those ghosts, arguing and buzzing across the magic glass of those sublime pictures.

Episode two of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 3 March, at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

So, in his enthusiasm to do his bit in World War One, he joins a regiment that has a Welsh name but discovers that it contains as many Cockneys as it does Taffs. He survives the horrors of the trenches and returns to Britain, his knapsack full of wonderful drawings of his comrades from the Western Front.

He is determined to make his living as an artist but does so in the oddest way: he heads for an abandoned monastery on the steep flanks of a tiny, remote hamlet, called Capel y Ffin, in the eastern Black Mountains of Wales. There, he joins an artistic community, led by the distinguished (and, it turns out, disturbingly odd) sculptor, Eric Gill, who had moved from gentler Sussex to the monastery with his religious cohorts and extended family.

As David Jones expert Dr Anne Price Owen explained to us on a grey, freezing morning in Capel y Ffin, this was a turning point for Jones. The simple, Spartan existence he found at the monastery, steeped in religious mysticism and guided by Gill's quirky creativity, helped Jones break loose of the artistic conventions that had governed his approach to painting up to that point.

Our cameraman, Tudor Evans, framed the monastery against the hillside - a panorama complete with what appeared to be the very same horses that Jones included in his drawings and paintings back in 1925.

In reverential, hushed tones, Tudor, with one eye glued to the viewfinder, said, 'Superb. What absolute peace. It looks as if nothing's changed in 85 years...' A moment later, he leapt back and pointed, his finger quivering, outraged that his cameraman's nirvana had been shattered by the sudden, howling appearance of a quad bike, charging towards the horses, driven by a farmer intent on rounding-up his livestock and caring nothing for Tudor's artistic sensibilities.

Our director, Steven Freer, the very essence of diplomacy, consoles Tudor. 'It's OK,' he says, in words as soothing as the British Ambassador might use in a nuclear missile bunker in Pyongyang, 'you've shot some wonderful stuff for us already. We've got more than enough...'

Tudor doesn't look convinced but we pack up, the quad-bike's vile whine still echoing off both sides of the valley, and head west to the jewel that is the Glynn Vivian gallery in Swansea. I know I'm going to feel more at home there, in Dylan Thomas's ugly lovely town, full of glorious pictures, painted by the very same pals Dylan argued with over milky coffee at the Kardomah. Evan Walters, Ceri Richards, Alfred Janes, Vincent Evans and a host more of west Wales' best. What a treat!

Episode two of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 3 March at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales, or afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Two professional climbers have anchored themselves to the rock. They tighten the ropes that connect them to the cameraman and me. The camera starts turning, I start climbing and we start filming the first of four programmes that will tell the story of art created in Wales during the 20th century.

As I climb, I struggle to remember when I was last in Blaenau without being drenched. Muscles straining, I reach a rocky promontory from which Augustus John, artistic superstar of Edwardian Britain, painted one of his rare Welsh landscapes.

Colin Thomas has worked out the spot where the great man must have stood his easel, more or less. There's no record, of course, of Augustus having got there by rock-climbing but Colin figured that, visually, me hanging by my fingernails before saying my bit in front of the camera would be a lot more interesting than the sight of me squelching up a boggy Blaenau track.

For me, this is paradise. Art, climbing, Snowdonia, a great story and a wonderful production crew: no-one in the world could have been more fortunate than me on that miraculously dry day just west of Blaenau.

After our exertions - all prolonged by me stumbling over my lines as I tried not to stumble over tangled climbing ropes - we needed tea and found it in a cafe just opposite the Queens Hotel. As I stirred my cup I remembered the warmth and support that the marvellous people of Blaenau had given to the striking miners in 1984/85. It was another reason why I had wanted so much to present these programmes.

Each journey, the length of Wales, which I drove from the southern coalfield to the nuclear power stations that we were picketing in the north during those historic 12 months, reminded me that there can be few more beautiful landscapes anywhere in the world. Those journeys had made me want to paint again, after almost two decades of denouncing 'gallery art' as 'bourgeois individualism'.

Where did I learn such ghastly rhetoric? In London, of course, during the mad, wonderful 1960s when I studied Fine Art (and revolution) at Hornsey, one of the most famous art colleges in the land. As my mother had put it at the time, when I told her I'd given up painting in order to advance the revolutionary cause, 'You're completely cracked, boy. I knew it would happen when you went up to London to live!'

She was completely right, of course. Renouncing painting had led me, via all kinds of tortuous industrial, academic and trade union tracks to the doors of Parliament and ministerial office in government. But, now, 45 years after I'd set-off from Aberdare for London, gripping my portfolio of sixth-form paintings, BBC Wales was giving me a chance to make amends for being 'cracked' back in 1968 and to contribute to the brave trail pioneered by a handful of art historians who have reminded all who are prepared to listen that the art of Wales in the 20th century is of a quality that compares with art produced anywhere in the world.

Framing Wales begins on Thursday 24 February at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales.

It struck me that rugged, dramatic scenery was the obvious place to start. After all, for over 250 years, our sublime Welsh landscape has drawn and inspired artists, from Richard Wilson and JMW Turner to Charles Burton and Ernest Zobole.

And, of course, that landscape has people in it. Special people who provided the security and encouragement that enabled artists to pursue new directions in their work. Heinz Koppel and Josef Herman, for example, escaped Nazi tyranny and found sanctuary and inspiration among the men and women of Dowlais and Ystradgynlais. They brought with them new ideas and challenging techniques that helped inspire young Welsh artists. And the place was wide open to new ideas.

Kim Howells

Right at the beginning of the century Wales possessed not only coal, slate and steel industries the equal of any in the world, but a painter whose reputation rode as high in the international celebrity league tables as any artist from Paris, Berlin or New York. Augustus John was a force to be reckoned with in every sense: a draughtsman of extraordinary skill and flair, capable of infusing his work with penetrating insights into the character of his sitters, he was in constant demand and able to command huge commissions.

Augustus John

Ready, always, to sail close to the rocks of scandal and controversy, Augustus John made no secret of his sister Gwen's willingness to pose naked for him. He considered her to be a painter of the first rank and, indeed, her reputation grew throughout the century.

Working in France, while her brother painted the great and the good of British Society, Gwen John became the model and lover of the world's most celebrated sculptor, Auguste Rodin, before retreating into a world of religious mysticism where her painting flourished. Not bad for two children, born and raised in West Wales.

That is why we have chosen them to begin this remarkable story. In four films, starting with the Johns and ending with the continuing creative surge into the 21st century, we will show how painters in Wales, throughout the century, produced work the equal of any in the world.

Framing Wales begins on Thursday 24 February at 7.30pm on BBC Two Wales.