Overview
British artist Lucy Jones is renowned for her raw, wild landscapes and distinctively provocative self-portraits, characterised by expressive brushwork and vibrant colour. Balancing an intricate rendering of line and space in her landscapes with the powerful simplicity of her portraits, Jones’s paintings conduct a journey through both interior landscapes and the external world beyond.
Landscapes and Inscapes, an exhibition of new landscape and portrait paintings includes a portrait of artist Grayson Perry, commissioned by the Attenborough Arts Centre (University of Leicester) which will be displayed for the first time.
The exhibition also coincides with a the publication of a new book, Awkward Beauty published by Elephant (23 May 2019). Awkward Beauty is the first publication to draw together both her portraits and landscape paintings from the past twenty-five years.
In her self-portraits, (for example With a Handicap Like Yours...) Jones’s revealing and defiant portrayal of her own body addresses ideas of femininity, aging and disability. Both personal and political, they address both the fragility and strength of the body, and society’s way of viewing difference in others. In recent years, Jones has also turned her attention to creating portraits of other people, working with male subjects close to her.
Writer and Art Critic Philip Vann has described Jones’s transformative vision of humanity as showing “the inextricable dignity and vulnerability of other people, friends, loved ones and the artist herself - explored with a rare, expansive clarity, vibrancy and originality”.
Publications
