- Venue
- Flowers Central
- Location
This book offers both an effective introductory text and a more detailed discussion of Lucy Jones’ work. With essays by William Packer, Matthew Collings and the artist herself, Stepping out into a World Beyond explores the contextual debates surrounding the artist in contrast to Lucy Jones own writing, which outlines her working method, concerns and philosophies.
Comprising of landscapes produced throughout the artists’ career, this book illustrates the development of this work; isolated from her other chosen subjects matters (i.e. portraiture). In this, we are effectively presented with a concise narrative about Jones’ relationship with her landscape work; paintings with an endearing aesthetic that are intensely coloured with an emphasis on refined line and evocative space.
Through Stepping out into a World Beyond we can trace the artists’ palette’s increasing subtlety and sophistication, as Jones’ work indicates a confidence of self, medium and subject. Her writing in the text echoes this sentiment, with an ‘unapologetic’ (p9), matter of fact tone. Throughout, these images show a pervading linear importance, as the paintings become less figurative and more streamlined (with occasional print-like details), the awareness of place and space grows into a sense of self, with eloquent marksmanship and confident line.
Teetering between concerns of line and colour, Jones’ transition between drawing and painting within each work is evident. This trace of the artistic process, of looking, editing and making, speaks of Jones’ ‘taut tension between me, and what I am looking at, and the canvas’ (p28), resulting in an honesty of experience within the landscape which is both laboured and joyful.
With her intriguing choices of detail (such as in Pink Wall, 1996 and Bridging the Gap, 2002) she seems to question a sense of space and reality. This overcomes the familiarity of the (specific, yet somewhat generic) images, which both assumes and imposes constraints upon the painter; asking if the process of painting removes the image from its subject, and likewise the artist from their image.
The essays in this book offer useful background, but an emphasis on linguistic communication regarding this work jars with the paintings pure visual language. Emphasised by Jones’ anti-directive titles, the work is removed from any defined narrative (eschewing the contemporary tendency to validate visual communication by linguistic means), acknowledging her distinction from mainstream contemporary art.
This is old-school painting, with traditional concerns. Reminiscent of Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Hockney and Hodgkins, Jones’ landscape painting revels in its artistry with an emphasis on content over context. This is an established, nostalgic take on painting, but painting that is essentially relevant, learning from all that which has gone before it and communicating, with unutterable elegance, the essentials of experience.
