lucy jones the cycle of life

Flowers Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new landscape and portrait paintings by Lucy Jones.
Lucy Jones is known for her painted self-portraits which address ideas of femininity, aging and disability through a frank and revealing portrayal of her own body. For the first time in many years, Jones has returned to making portraits of others. Titles of works in the exhibition such as Husband reveal the intimacy of the relationships between Jones and her sitters, addressing ideas of the self through the unknown interiority of those close to her.
The portrait titled Roger is of a close friend and sculptor, and former fellow Gulbenkian Rome Scholar, the late Roger Partridge. The painting was commissioned by his family during medical treatment for Cancer, and was completed shortly before his death. For Jones, the poignant experience of painting the portrait allowed for a further meditation on the artistic ideas of awkward beauty and the precariousness of life, which have threaded through the work of both artists. Working over an extended period of time, Jones has subjected the portrait to persistent re-configuration, shifting the intensity of characteristically expressive swathes of colour and adjusting the teetering balance of form until physical likeness gives way to an ‘unseen’ essence of the sitter.
During 2014, Jones spent longer periods working outside in the landscape, along the borders of England and Wales. The paintings which have arisen from this prolonged engagement respond to the particular sensations of place and the revolving cycles of the seasons. The landscape paintings can also evoke a sense of Jones’s own physicality through the visceral energy implied by each mark, evident in the language she uses to describe her process: “grabbing hold” of its essence, and“pinning down” colour.
Within each arrangement, memories of space, rhythm and colour are reinvented, beginning with an initial tonal reaction to a pre-coloured ground. In the painting Tree, the picture plane is dissected into two halves by a bowing tree trunk. This division allows for two distinct pictorial spaces to operate within the canvas; the area to the right projects upwards towards the viewer, while the fields to the left recede towards infinity, inviting the viewer to explore the painting from its edges.
Matthew Collings has said: “Colour textures, colour space, colour pleasure – she puts all the elements together in ways that seem both organised, possessing a strong eye for pattern and arrangement, and raw, possessing a great capacity for taking a mad chance. A colour area can seem like a burn or something searing, not something built or carved. Colour can loom, make the whole picture seem like it’s about to take off, or it can be like explosive charges…” 1

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Resizing images for digital print (Krita)

Image
Working with Images Computers work with files and as a painting program, Krita works with images as the type of file it creates and manipulates. What do Images Contain? If you have a text document, it of course contains letters, strung in the right order, so the computer loads them as coherent sentences. Raster Data This is the main data on the paint layers you make. So these are the strokes with the paint brush and look pixely up close. A multi-layer file will contain several of such layers, that get overlaid on top of each other so make the final image. A single layer file will usually only contain raster data. Vector Data These are mathematical operations that tell the computer to draw pixels on a spot. This makes them much more scalable, because you just tell the operation to make the coordinates 4 times bigger to scale it up. Due to this vector data is much more editable, lighter, but at the same time it’s also much more CPU intensive. Operation Data
Read more

Paula Rego

Image
Paula Rego is a Portuguese artist known for her paintings and prints which are often based on children’s folktales. Among her most famous works are her  Dog Women paintings, a playful series depicting a magical realist world where women behave as dogs. Rego’s work is heavily influenced by Surrealist artists like Joan Miró , though gradually her paintings have become more realistically rendered with similarities to the work of the painter Balthus in their strong, clear drawing style and depictions of women in strange or unsettling situations. Born on January 26, 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal, she went on to study in London at the Slade School of Fine Art. Rego’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. She continues to live and work in London, England.  Paula Rego is a relevant artist for my research, she bases some of her work on children's folktales, working to
Read more

shani rys james

Image
DATE:   08.05.18    WRITTEN BY:   NIGEL JARRETT    POSTED IN:   REVIEWS ,  VISUAL ARTS EXHIBITION | THIS INCONSTANT STATE BY SHANI RHYS JAMES Nigel Jarrett  travels to London to review the first solo exhibition from Shani Rhys James since her residency in New York in 2015. Shani Rhys James is not alone among artists in exploring a single corner of human existence time and again. Predominantly domestic, her niche also resonates outwards and inwards with unspecified anxiety; not that everyone requires explication or that, in being non-specific, it’s a state with which the viewer cannot sympathise. In many ways her work is serial self-portraiture, in which a variation of narcissism wrestles with deep and chronic unease. Her milieu appears to have the sub-text of a Paula Rego and, sometimes, the indulgence of a Bonnard, though in the latter, and at the practical level, mainly with a less subtle palette. The Rego-style inside story seems to be less savage, and the gratificatio
Read more