Stuart Jones

I have been working as an artist for over 20 years. My specialism is contemporary painting and drawing. My practice explores the human relationship with the landscape and the increasing disconnect from our environment due to technological advancement and the conflict with the natural world due to the way we live. Ideas around the Anthropocene and the climate crisis also feed my practice. My making process involves chance and serendipity, initial drawings are manipulated using experimentation with collage and photocopying, this informs the content and unique shape of the finished canvas. The viewer becomes the missing human presence within the work, the paintings becoming portals that the viewer has to negotiate into an alternative world, space or time. I have exhibited nationally and internationally.

 

Amongst other awards, I have recently been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2020 and awarded the Contemporary Arts Trust prize 2019. I am currently a Digswell Arts fellow and I am represented by Arc Prints in London. My work has been loaned by MGM Studios, Paramount British Pictures and the BBC.

 

‘Slip’ oil, spray paint, charcoal and ash on canvas.

 

The work is inspired by looking beyond our environment, questioning reality and what exists beyond our boundaries. More recently I have been reading a lot about the idea of the ‘underland’ what is below the Earths surface and beneath our feet. I have been exploring the idea of caves, mines and geological processes happening below the Earths crust, also myths related to the ‘underland’. All this is still with the idea of looking up and out of caves or enclosed spaces, the openings becoming portals or ‘windows’ to other spaces, places or worlds. I was trying to connect and describe, in an abstract way the distance or journey from the earths core through the crust, ‘us’, the sky and onto the earths atmosphere and beyond. I have created an abstract landscape that is in flux. The painting is made up of 2 canvas constructions each one has layers of spray paint, oil paint stains, charcoal and ash on a canvas ground the main larger canvas is made up of smaller pieces of canvas 'cut ups' collaged together