London
NCS
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Lucy Jones painted her first nude self-portrait at 50. She was in New York with her husband Peter Leach, she mentioned, when he “took a picture of my backside. I thought, ‘Well I don’t look too bad from the back, so maybe I’ll paint it!’”
Jones is sitting on a wood chair the center of a white-washed gallery area, surrounded by a group of her personal works spanning a long time for the opening of a brand new self-portraiture present in London. While the piece in query, “Being 50,” is absent from the exhibition it’s putting sufficient to recollect off by coronary heart: an inky black canvas break up in two, with Jones’ tilted gait rendered nude in two separate photos.
The examine of the artist’s entrance is flat and naïvely painted — her proper arm bent backwards at a clumsy proper angle. (Jones was identified with cerebral palsy — a lifelong mind dysfunction that completely impacts physique motion and muscle coordination — as a younger toddler.) Her again profile, nevertheless, is extra elegantly shaded with her backbone gently curved to the left, hips following. An picture of a wood cane pokes up from the underside to divide the portray whereas a floating constellation of deviled eggs looms above her head — a nod to menopause and shedding her fertility.
Painting nude will not be Jones’ regular method to documenting her bodily kind. In reality, after her fiftieth portrait, she didn’t create one other one till sixteen years later. Why? Because she was lastly a pensioner. “Lucky me!” Jones laughed, as she spoke with NCS within the gallery. “At last, I’ve made it.” She was nonetheless portray herself, nevertheless — on massive canvases with a fearless method to paint. These are the reflections of Jones we glimpse within the present, who regardless of her apparent expertise “didn’t really expect anybody to ever be interested in (my) self portraits,” she mentioned. “But it was a way for me to keep drawing.”
In “totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones,” the artists’ bodily incapacity is rendered in vibrant, brash Hockney-esque colours and assured, expressionist brush strokes. “Most art historically never mentions disability,” mentioned Jones. “But I’ve been really quite interested to bring that onto the canvas. And over the years I think I have.” Her strolling body and cane are repeating motifs, as are backwards phrases and sentences — a nod to her invisible wrestle with dyslexia, and an try at sharing that have with her viewers. “I usually do mirror writing on the painting to make it awkward for the audience to decipher it,” she defined. She usually seems with stiff, distorted fingers. Hands, Jones mentioned, are the window within the soul. “They express so much of the person,” she mentioned.
Jones’ wit exhibits by means of within the titles of her artworks, which regularly seek advice from her expertise as an individual residing with disabilities. In “It’s a Long Way to the Bottom of this Canvas” (2000), Jones is suspended within the high proper nook, her glasses and cane woefully mid-flight down the portray. “It could be a metaphor for life,” she mentioned. “Or for me, walking, anywhere. It’s a long way.”
There’s a sardonic edge slicing by means of the work. The title of her 2018 piece “With a Handicap like Yours…”, is lifted verbatim from a dialog Jones as soon as had with a physician who, after Jones complained of her lack of dexterity, was reluctant to offer the artist physiotherapy for her hand. In Jones’ thoughts, the phrase additionally translated to ‘What do you expect?’
“He was a lovely doctor, I’m not criticizing,” she conceded. “But it was an old-fashioned expression. I wanted to poke that a little bit.” In the work, Jones is on the brink of an eye fixed roll, her face angled in direction of the viewer in an exhausted stare. As a retort, she painted a 3rd hand reaching into the portray — a surrealist quip. “(My art) gets more and more confrontational because I want to comment to the world and make them think about disability and different types of disability,” she mentioned.
The earliest work within the present dates again to 1996, when Jones may work on bigger, extra monumental items and stand for longer intervals of time. “The idea of standing doesn’t appeal to me anymore,” she laughed. Now, the artist paints on her knees, which has meant downsizing her canvases to make sure she will “still reach the top.” The discomfort from being on her toes means Jones should additionally now paint her self-portraits from pictures, as an alternative of in entrance of the mirror.
She known as Matthew Flowers, the British artwork seller and managing director of Flowers Gallery, “brave” for staging her present. Not simply because it facilities somebody like Jones so audaciously, however as a result of Flowers rebukes the business’s perpetual urge for food for novelty and fixed creation. “They’re not all new paintings,” the artist mentioned. “Most of them go back a long time.” For Jones, creating a whole new physique of labor for a gallery present, when a single portray takes her three months, is unthinkable.
Her latest piece, created this yr, is the third in her age-based trilogy, marking the artist at 70. The work exhibits a self-portrait of Jones on all fours trying up on the viewer, whereas within the high proper nook is a clipping from a leaflet attributed to The Centre for Spastic Children in Cheyne Walk. On the leaflet, {a photograph} of Jones exhibits her once more on her fingers and knees — this time at three years previous, studying to crawl for the primary time. Jones doesn’t see the parallel as a melancholy one. Seventy is its personal milestone, and plenty of shocking, fantastic issues have occurred in between, she mentioned. For Jones, reaching this level “is a shock” as a result of “I didn’t realize that with cerebral palsy you deteriorate. And let me tell you, you do. Which is rubbish, actually. Complete rubbish.” What age would possibly she wish to commemorate subsequent, 99? “99!” She laughed. “Paint myself in a coffin or something.”
“totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones” runs till August on the Flowers Gallery in Mayfair, London.