Amy Brown Visual art research

Lucy Jones: ‘My work is not slick and I struggle to resolve my paintings’ The artist talks about her recent return to making portraits of others, and explains what she sees as a balancing act between the tools that go to make up the language of a painting by ANNA McNAY Perhaps better known for her self-portraits, addressing ideas of femininity, ageing and disability, Lucy Jones (b1955) has recently returned to painting portraits of others: a close friend, her husband and her father. These portraits, as well as a number of her lush and colourful landscapes, represent the Circle of Life in her latest exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street. Jones spoke to Studio International about the compulsion to make art, the importance of her cerebral palsy and dyslexia, and what she looks to capture in a portrait. Anna McNay: You are particularly known for your self-portraits, but for your exhibition at Flowers, you have returned, for the first time in many years, to painting portra...

Conclusion To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buck-eye does not grow in New England, and the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. The wild-goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it. Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stu...

The Ponds Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “to fresh woods and pastures new,” or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice r...