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Financial Times, 4 September 2009
The Threadneedle Prize at the Mall Galleries - extract by Jackie Wullschlager
It was to counter this bias, and to answer and reassert broad and continuing popular interest in figurative painting and sculpture, that the £25,000 Threadneedle Prize was launched at the Mall Galleries last year. This is not some reactionary Stuckist joke: organised by the Federation of British Artists, selected by a distinguished panel of judges - including Desmond Shawe-Taylor, surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and artists Jock McFayden and Daphne Todd - and funded by Threadneedle Investments, it is Britain’s most lucrative art award. Its second presentation, opened this week, is a triumph. Combining the work of young and established names, and ranging from a two-metre crocheted upright brown bear by Shauna Richardson to Louise Balaam’s tiny, luscious oil on panel close-up 'Oak Tree', the exhibition of some 80 works is serious, engaging, diverse, unexpected and gives more pleasure and provocation than any Turner show of the past decade. If you have any regard for living art, go - and vote; the winner, from the judge’s shortlist of seven, will be decided by public vote and announced on September 14. All the shortlisted works are interesting and indicative of a surge of confidence in painting and sculpture as they burst free from a generation’s dominance by the Young British Art movement. Two are outstanding, assured and distinctive in their striking individual expression, and of museum quality. One is Lucy Jones’s airy, turbulent depiction of rounded hills and heavy skies, 'Over the Hill', its luscious crimson-green-sunflower vibrations marking Jones as among the greatest English colourists, and its raw emotional energy held taut by a boldly abstracted, simplified composition. I love the awkward grace of Jones’s paintings - connected, I suspect, to her own difficulties as a sufferer from cerebral palsy - and the sense she conveys of being alone within a landscape, at once liberated and overwhelmed by it. The other, and the weirdest and most haunting piece in the show, is Belfast-born Tim Shaw’s 'Middle World', a sculptural installation 20 years in the making, consisting of 70 small bronze and terracotta soldiers and half-animal warriors arranged on a large stone table resembling something between a pinball machine and an altarpiece, intricately carved above with gargoyles, skulls and bomber planes, tapering off in a cluster of stalactites below. Nature and art, life and death, man-made past and technological future, are all weighed up in this superbly crafted gothic/21st-century fantasy of war and peace, its silvery sheen spotlit to illuminate 'a cold glitter of souls', as Seamus Heaney described limbo. Jones and Shaw are mid-career practitioners who have trodden a solitary path: a win for either would lend gravitas to the Threadneedle Prize, as well as to the artist. Jackie Wullschlager ___________________________________________________
Financial Times, December 2008
'Return of the landscape' - extract, by Jackie Wullschlager
Two superb landscape shows - Lucy Jones, Stepping Out Into a World Beyond, a mid-career retrospective at Flowers East, and Faggionato’s Oleg Vassiliev, Recent Work - are among the most optimistic and enjoyable exhibitions in London currently riding high on brilliant gloom (Tate’s Bacon and Rothko, apocalyptic fantasy at the Royal Academy’s GSK Contemporary, and Warhol’s deathly aesthetic at the Hayward). Jones and Vassiliev hold their own in such cerebral company because, in different ways, they have absorbed within a figurative language those major movements of the last half century - abstraction, minimalism, conceptualism - whose ascent is largely responsible for the decline of landscape. Both bring sophistication and a sharply honed individuality, as well as a refined sensibility, to the genre, with not a shade of anachronism. Jones began painting London cityscapes in the 1980s, and brings an urban edginess to the views of Shropshire which are now her main motifs. Stepping Out opens with "National Gallery" and "Streaming Yellow", large-scale London views whose nervous disequilibrium - shaky buildings, swaying lights, angular tree trunks - and shrill non-naturalistic colour mark Jones as a late expressionist. With her pink pathways, scarlet St Martin’s spire, vermilion Hungerford Bridge, and architectonic compositions - monumental bridges slicing through the picture plane, branches spiralling into anarchic grids - she makes London, especially the open spaces by the river, her own creation. Not since Derain in 1906 has anyone transfigured the Thames so extravagantly as Jones does in the sunflower-yellow "Winter South Bank", now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, or in the lime-lemon-olive harmonies and wobbly black and white steamer in "A Bus and A Bridge". Such titles serve, says Jones in a catalogue essay, "to defuse the emotional impact of the work: the ‘tragic’ is described in comic terms, and the comic is disguised as tragedy". This is more than a conceptual ploy. Jones, born with cerebral palsy, finds it hard to stand, walk or talk clearly. Although her self-portraits explore her sense of self-division, these raw, awkward, oddly balanced paintings are stronger - searing self-expressions where anguish is inextricable from joy, and the cityscape is made visionary. When Jones moved to Shropshire in 2005, her work became immediately less introspective, more connected with earth and sky. Still painted in dense, vigorous strokes that convey currents of emotional energy, now heavy, now airy, her vistas here are the low rounded hills, mosaics of fields, big skies and sometimes close-up details, Distortions of scale, jolted perspectives, colour vibrations, remain crucial to composition - central crimson masses in "The Rose Garden", ochre stumps against yellow ground in "Three Posts", scribbled blue tendrils and fat black curls animating "In the Garden". Agitated lines, though, are diminishing, while the tendency to abstract, reduce and flatten, which gives her work formal rigour, grows more pronounced - "End of Day" and the magenta-purple "Night to Come" are pared down to bands of colour. All confirm Jones as the most exciting English colourist of her generation. Jones distils the experience of being in a landscape while 77-year-old Oleg Vassiliev paints the remembrance of it. Concluding his 1949 study of landscape at a time when man had lost faith in nature, Kenneth Clark wondered "Can we escape from our fears by creating once again the image of an enclosed garden? No. The artist may escape from battles and plagues, but he cannot escape from an idea." Vassiliev and Jones put concepts, as well as sensations, back into landscape, and in doing so get away with paintings whose sincerity challenges the ironies and subterfuges of a post-landscape age. ‘Lucy Jones, Stepping Out Into A World Beyond’, Flowers East, London, to January 3 2009 ___________________________________________________
Guardian, April 2007
LucyJones, painter 'Painting is still biased towards men - there's a masculine way of seeing' Interview by Laura Barnett
Discovering posters of works by Toulouse-Lautrec in a shop near my home in Kensington when I was a teenager. It inspired me to start painting portraits myself. What was your big breakthrough? My first solo exhibition at the Angela Flowers Gallery in London in 1986. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought two of my paintings. It was amazing to know they would be shown with all those masterpieces. Who or what have you sacrificed for your art? My social life. Between the ages of 15 and 32 - when I met my husband - I was totally engrossed in my work. If someone saw one of your paintings on 1000 years' time what would it tell them about the year 2000? Despite the difficulties in the world we could still celebrate difference. What one song would feature on the soundtrack to your life? The love duet from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. If I die listening to that, I will be happy. Have you done anything cultural lately? On a trip to Morocco recently a guide took us out to meet peop[le living in caves. It was a snapshot of a staggering culture, so differnt to our own. Do you suffer for your art? Yes, both emotionally and physically. I often get frustrated, and finding the right position to paint in with cerebral palsy is difficult: I have to kneel for two to three hours at a time. Are you hungry for fame? No; I feel very ambiguous about it. What's your favourite art gallery? Tate Modern. It's a terrific way to protect contemporary art for the future. What's the greatest threat to art today? Art schools are bogged down in farcical administration; it destroys creativity. Complete this sentence: At heart I'm just a frustrated... Historian. What advice would you give a young artist just starting out? If you're lucky enough to attract attention. your career can easily acquire a life of its own. Try to take control. What work of art would you most like to own? Anything by Jackson Pollock. The way he fills space is utterly beautiful; he creates s whole universe in a painting. What's the best advice anyone ever gave you? At art school a teacher told me that, although I was getting top marks, I wasn't working hard enough. Is art a man's world? Not any more in sculpture and mixed media, but painting is still biased towards men. Most of the institutions and painting courses are run by men; there's a masculine way of seeing. What cultural form leaves you cold or confused? Video art. I find it so boring. It's very fashionable, but quite often it's just not very good. ___________________________________________________
The Week, April 2007
LucyJones at Flowers Central
All have a high viewpoint, with big dramatic skies and a craquelure of field patterns roughly drawn in pastel on the free, watercolour masses of the panorama. Jones's colour, while being strongly expressionistic - almost Nolde-like in Falls the Day, for instance - remains basically naturalistic, although freely interpreted to include a bright pink or scarlet field here and there. The strongly gestural chalk strokes of On Top of the World give the work a physical sense of urgency. There's a freedom and immediacy about these moody, windswept landscapes that is difficult to achieve in watercolour on this scale. ___________________________________________________
The Independent, March 2006
Adrift in an imperfect world
In fact this is not the case at all. Jones has had a long training as a painter. The subject of the paintings looks a little awkward in part because she is herself disabled, and what she is doing is trying to define, quite unflinchingly, the nature of her own imperfect physical presence. There is little else here other than the woman herself, and her own fiercely scrutinising gaze. Other painters, when painting themselves or others, make much of props - clothes, say, or furniture, desks, books, horses, skulls, and so on - in order to define their place in the world, to give their subject physical, social and intellectual definition and elevation. Think of Goya or Ingres, for example. Jones, by contrast, has chosen to be seen to be nothing but herself - the appearance of her body, sometimes clothed, sometimes not, and one or two necessary accoutrements that quite often turn up with her because she is dependent upon them. Most usually there is a walking stick - it is often floating through the air, as if making its own jocular claims to independence - and a pair of spectacles. Then there is a walking frame, which appears just once in this suite of paintings. Very occasionally Jones paints herself seated in a chair, but for the most part she herself is all there is. For the most part she does not stand on anything either. In fact, there is almost no context whatsoever so that the only thing we are invited to ask ourselves, as onlookers, is: "What sort of being is this?" I say there is no context. In fact, there is one: the frame of the painting itself. Jones is very much aware of having captured herself within these painted spaces. She makes light of this sometimes - in one called "It's a long way to the bottom of this canvas", she is shown with her body horizontal to the top edge of the canvas, as if about to walk down it. Her usual accoutrements are in free fall. In another, "Can you show me a way out of here?", her hand rests against the side of the canvas, as if she believes herself to be trapped within the picture space, and is perhaps testing its outer limits. Perhaps she genuinely feels that - genuinely trapped. Perhaps she feels not so much contented as condemned to realise her own image in these portraits, over and over again, in order to arrive at some real understanding of what might constitute the nature of the person called Jones. Yes, if you wanted to sound a touch pretentious, you could call these paintings by Jones an existential exercise, an attempt to define and to dramatise the nature of being, and of one being in particular. There is drama here - these are not self-effacing portraits by any means. There is high drama, for example, in the use of fiercely contrasting colour. Jones paints her own skin in a whole range of colours - brilliant greens and yellows, for example. And then she sets these dramatic skin tones against the often equally-dramatic colour of the background of the painting itself, or the colour of the clothes she has chosen to wear, or against the blazing red of her lipstick. But, coming away from the exhibition, what we remember most of all about these paintings is the nature of the painter's gaze: rapt, concentrated, almost startled. It is as if every time she comes to paint herself she takes one step back with surprise: "Here I am again!" And then, having completed the painting to her partial satisfaction (no painter is ever really wholly pleased with their work), there is the added burden of observing herself having been observed by herself. Did she measure up? ___________________________________________________
ALISTAIR HICKS
Lucy Jones is disarmingly honest. Her work is divided in two. She paints London and she paints herself. Her portraits of her native city are unpopulated. The grand buildings of central London, Trafalgar Square, the Embankment and the South Bank proclaim a strictly ordered world, albeit one that has been transformed by her highly vivid and individual colour. Yet it is the self-portraits that reveal the full depth of emotion of the artist's life. Jones has cerebral palsy. She started to make self portraits about five years ago. Before that she found it difficult enough to look at herself, let alone paint herself. Her meteoric success as a painter had given her great confidence and now she supplies herself with the most expressive of models. Jones has always been prepared to experiment with herself, to illustrate her vulnerability and the problems of balance. In one portrait her head peeps into the picture at an acute angle as though almost by mistake. In another, paintbrush in hand, she seems to be tripping to the canvas, the whole weight of her mind and body is being thrown into the painting. There is never any doubt about her sheer love for the act of painting. One of the heights of this exhibition is a series of three full-length self portraits. Rising out of a Chinese Imperial yellow background is a figure fit to have graced the courts of the Renaissance Vatican. Lips curl, eyes glare, there is no escape. Yet in the same series is a picture of a beautiful woman glowing with the radiant line and colour of Matisse. There are no blinkers, but there is no false modesty. When Jones started painting herself, she could not afford another model. Now she is looking for other people to sit for her. Yet it would have been a tragedy if we had been denied her self-examination, for it yields her knowledge of the narrow line between order and chaos. She tackles such themes in the most intimate way. To quote Isaac Bashevis Singer "Only dilettantes try to be universal; a real artist knows that he's connected to a certain people". She is a Londoner, yet her London apparently has no people. When one sees her townscapes next to her self-portraits one realises this is patently untrue. Though there hasn't been a dramatic change in palette, the city paintings of the last year have a slightly mellower mood than the earlier work. The colours in "The Bus", for instance, are no longer Mediterranean and are of a more reflective nature. The balance between the artist and her subject is swinging. There was a time at the very beginning when the primary function of those great buildings along the Thames was to provide a neutral background for her emotions. Today she demands much more. Jones' ability to paint honestly, not to be distracted by side issues, is one of her greatest strengths. She has been to America a few times in the last few years and was revitalised by visits to the Museum of Modern Art and others, refreshed by the straightforward pleasure in the painting of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and other Americans. Some of the grandeur of her London scenes owes a debt to a two year study of classical art and architecture as a Rome scholar. But overriding all is the enthusiasm for the act of painting. She had to succeed as a painter; she could bear no alternative. ___________________________________________________
IN THE LOOKING GLASS
An exhibition of contemporary self-portraits by women artists The Usher Gallery Interview with LUCY JONES By Judith Collins
LJ. I went to the Byam Shaw School, Camberwell and the Royal College. I didn't do any at the Byam Shaw but I remember painting a self- portrait at Camberwell. It was a tonal painting and very grey. It included part of a mirror and therefore it included not only me but the outside world as well. It was quite an intense little portrait of my head and shoulders, about three feet high. I included my left hand holding up a paintbrush. This said to the viewer that I am a painter. Also at Camberwell I painted other people, well models. Now I look I feel that those other people were me, so these paintings were in some way self-portraits. At Camberwell, in my second and third year, I was allowed to set up the models. I was in charge and I could choose the pose. Usually at Camberwell, the models were dumped in the middle of the studio and I didn't like that as the space around the model was one that I was not interested in. When I got to the Royal College, I was also able to do what I wished with the model and they were usually set up against a wall in a shallow space. JC. Can you say why you preferred shallow space to more extended space? LJ. I know that I wanted to paint big paintings - six foot paintings - and I wanted to depict a very direct relationship between the model and/or myself and the viewer. These big paintings meant that the model was about life size. The first studio that I worked in at the Royal College had a spiral staircase in it. I put this in my paintings then because I liked the wrought iron patterning of the metal. It reminded me of the wrought iron patterning in several of Matisse's paintings of models. I was also interested in painting clothed models, who wore patterned robes. This was because I was not interested in a life-room nude which seemed as a woman and a painter to be problematic. There is a lot of confusion, I think, with life-models in life-rooms as to whether they are really human or a model mannequin. Students and artists often only have vague historical notions of what they want to use and to take from a life-room situation. JC. Did you paint any self portraits when you were a post graduate at the British School at Rome? LJ. One of the most obvious reasons for painting oneself is a practical one. When I was at the British School at Rome, there was very little money for models and, in my last few months there, I started to paint myself. I think I only did one or two self-portraits though. However, as I have said, when I was painting a model, I think in lots of ways I was actually painting myself anyway. But having started painting myself I then found it really quite liberating and freeing from having to have a model and from having to work out the relationship of the set-up that you put the model in. After all, if the model was really me, it was quite daring at last to be able to really begin to look at myself. Like slowly taking bits of me out of a box and beginning to examine them. It was so much easier just to look at myself - a reflection in the mirror. JC. What were these Rome self portraits like? LJ. They were small, like the Camberwell one, and just my head and shoulders. It took me a long time to be able to look at all of me. It wasn't until about five years ago that I painted a self- portrait of all of me. I have gradually begun to feel happy with myself as I took more out of the box and had a look, and this is reflected in my work. JC. Do your self-portraits help you with your other work? LJ. The simple answer is yes - they do help me with my other work. They are a change from doing townscapes and landscapes where I have to collect quite a lot of information to actually proceed with the painting. And with the townscapes I am very much looking out on the world and in lots of ways I am looking out on the same world that you are looking out on, although I am not transcribing that world in the same way another artist would. The self-portraits are very much to do with looking at me. I realise now, this includes me partly as a disabled person, and partly looking at various aspects of myself, that when I look back at the self-portraits they were quite often split down the middle, which was rather like the two sides of a coin. It reflects the positive and negative feelings I have about myself. But it also reflects in a very obvious way. I have cerebral palsy and the right side of me doesn't work nearly as well as the left side. I have had quite a lot of problems trying to use myself. Looking back at the self-portraits I see that they do teach me an awful lot. And gradually as I have gained confidence over the last ten years, and strength as both a person and a woman, I think the self-portraits have unified themselves. When I first started painting self-portraits I only ever did half a figure, so it used to be cut at the waist. Sometimes they were also cut down the middle of the figure. And then I gradually unified the figure, so that I gave less attention to the split halves of myself. Also I started painting my early self-portraits in black and white and then I slowly moved over to using far more colour. And the colour has helped me to unify the work. This has happened as I have become more unified and whole as a person. I have been doing self-portraits for about ten years now and there are a lot of them. About five years ago I suddenly felt confident enough to do a whole person, all of me, and that series of paintings appeared in a solo show at Angela flowers Gallery. I think these works were quite important as they were totally, completely and absolutely Lucy Jones. JC. When you talk of the colour becoming much brighter in your self portraits, do you make the colours up or are they true to life? LJ. In the painting 'Lucy Jones 1990' the red jacket that I am wearing was not actually red. It was a sort of dirty green. I made the colour up, and for me a colour can be a trigger. JC. I suppose it is too simple to equate colour with mood, to say red equals anger or joy. Do you remember why you made the jacket red? LJ. I can only say that the red was the right red. The picture is a positive picture. It means that the red jacket is working with the painting like a marriage. JC. You spoke of painting quite a lot of self portraits to date. How many full length ones do you think you have done? LJ. Probably about ten. I did that series I mentioned earlier; there were about four or five of them and they went into my show. We gave them titles like 'Totally Lucy Jones', 'Absolutely Lucy Jones' and 'Completely Lucy Jones'. When I had done those I felt as though I shouldn't go on painting self-portraits because I felt that was right, and maybe there was no more to say and that was it. JC. But you did go on. LJ. Yes I did. I think there are two main reasons why I still paint self-portraits. Firstly, as a balance to my other work. And secondly to act as a dialogue between me and the paintings and how I am and feel at the time. JC. How do you feel about them as a body of work? Are they changing in any way? LJ. I know they have changed. A few years ago somebody bought one of them and then two years later they saw another one, and commented that I looked so much happier in the later ones. JC. Do you agree? LJ. I was in a happy phase. I was in it when I painted 'Lucy Jones 1990'. JC. What is the reason/or your happiness? LJ. I met my husband about eight years ago and started going out with him. We got married about five years ago. As I said earlier I have become more confident about myself. I am now trying to do very positive and quite difficult things like learning to swim. JC. If you don't mind me saying so, the person in 'Lucy Jones 1997' does not look like you in the way that your other self portraits do. LJ. That is interesting. Because in a way I see it as more of a proper portrait. It is more detailed and it has a feeling of being fussy. I was trying to paint myself in a more traditional way. I think my work is quite regular when I paint it but then when I look at it again I see that it isn't. JC. How much preparation goes into your self-portraits? LJ. The biggest question before I begin is the size - how big should the canvas be. I have done pencil drawings of myself but these are not in any way preparations for paintings. They are quite separate things. I don't prepare because I value that freedom of working direct. JC. Do you still use a mirror to paint yourself or do you now feel that you know what you look like? LJ. I still use a mirror every time. As you can see in my studio I have two full length mirrors and another smaller one. I don't always remember what I look like. I do forget bits of me. Sometimes when I have been depressed I cannot remember the other sides of me other than the bad ones, the good sides can get lost. Depression can take a while to come out of. Also I think I have changed quite a lot in the last few years and depression is far less prominent. JC. Do you want to say anything about 'The Artist 1993' with its vibrant yellow background? LJ. I remember with that work that I was far more deliberate about acting on the colour and making it into something very positive. JC. And by contrast 'Lucy Jones 2 1994' is a much darker work. LJ. In that painting I am wearing glasses. I don't paint in glasses but I use them for reading. JC. In Lucy Jones 2 1995' you make quite a feature of your hair. LJ. Yes, it was longer then. This painting is quite an odd one. It is also a very small painting. The small ones either work or they don't. I did another little one the other day. JC. How long does a painting take you? How long did this little one take? LJ. I painted it in a few hours and that was quick. Others can take a week or two. Most can take a long time. I have painted since the age of eight. At that age I won a children's prize at the Byam Shaw School. I remember that it was a painting of the Serpentine Gallery building in Hyde Park and I stuck leaves on cut out of fabric. I have always painted what I could see. At art school we were told to paint what we knew. I suppose this lies behind my self-portraits. JC. Are you able to do things in your self-portraits that you cannot do otherwise? LJ. I think I can. I am usually fairly confrontational in my self-portraits. I think that I am nearly always looking out at the viewer, at the person who is looking at me. And this goes on into another question you have asked me - which artists do I admire? The most obvious person who looks out at the viewer is Rembrandt. There is that extraordinary empathy that you feel - or that l feel anyway -for his series of self-portraits. This doesn't quite come across in his other work. JC. Besides Rembrandt, what other artists' self-portraits do you admire? LJ. There is a Beckman self-portrait that I like a lot. Also I like Lucian Freud and Matisse. However, I think that a lot of self-portraits have been done by men and maybe are not ones that I am so interested in. I suspect that they are trying to project something onto the viewer, rather than the viewer looking at the person depicted. ___________________________________________________
TIME OUT
LucyJones
But the figure does not seem divided, since the sticks that define her also act as brackets. The brush identifies the activity that allows her to combat the disability indicated by the walking stick. For the first time since she was four years old, says Jones, she feels united. In 'Lucy Jones' Shadow' the figure seems whole; the brush in her hand holds at bay a purple shadow - an embodiment, perhaps, of her disability. Lucy Jones is the name the artist adopted as a student to assert her independence. Naming the self-portrait in the third person creates a certain objectivity; as though she were considering how she looks to others as well as to herself. Standing on one side of the canvas, she seems vulnerable but defiant; able to confront both her appearance and our prejudice. Jones refers to feelings of rage and frustration, but in her exuberant landscapes there is no evidence of either. Division is symbolised by bridges spanning the Thames and the chaos that is part of her experience threatens. But bridges join rather than separate, and the ability to grapple with chaos is often seen as a vital aspect of creativity. The pictures read as an affirmation, a celebration. Vigorous brushwork and brilliant Fauvist colours give them amazing energy; London's parks and riverbanks have never looked so alive. Inspiring. Sarah Kent ___________________________________________________
FINANCIAL TIMES
From river view to a cosmic void William Packer
But differences of course there must be, and with Lucy Jones the principal difference is of scale. She is clearly not trapped by the modern orthodoxy, that size of itself confers significance, and her latest Pembrokeshire landscapes, show her to be no less confident and authoritative on the much smaller scale. But the Thames paintings are very large indeed, and she handles them with an admirable, appropriately expansive assurance, keeping the surface open, the paint uncongested, the drawing active and direct. It is with the self-portraits, however, whether large or small, head alone or full-length, that she truly comes into her own. They have all the qualities of the landscapes and more, for with the drawing and the modelling of the form, the particular character of the subject admits of rather less approximation than a tree or hillside. And here, with no loss of the striking simplicity of image so typical of her work, there comes a more active intensity to the handling, and, the drawing takes on a more positive flourish, nose or lips established by the merest, confident flick of the brush, here and there, just so. Unsentimental in their self-regard, the small heads especially are the best things in the show. ___________________________________________________ 
Reviews
Jackie Wullschlager Financial Times Jackie Wullschlager Financial Times Laura Barnett The Guardian The Week Art, 14Apr07 Michael Glover The Independent Alistair Hicks Judith Collins Usher Gallery Sarah Kent Time Out William Packer FT To scroll, hold mouse over arrows 
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