Degree: BA (hons) Fine Art
University: City and Guilds of London Art School
Graduation Year: 2023
Selected for Paul Smith Presents: British Art
Shortlisted for Gilchrist-Fisher Award 2024
2023 Freelands Foundation Painting Prize winner.
Drawing inspiration from mountainous regions and barren uplands, Edward Jones' process includes drawing, painting and analogue photography, which result in large canvases that heave with muted colours and evocative outlines. This is an idea of landscape informed by a whorl of influences — historical, aesthetic and psychological — creating a finished work that plays with an ambiguous sense of space, place and time. These are as much internal landscapes as they are depictions of any 'real' places, and although Edward's landscapes include no human figures, 'Near A Petrol Station' attests to their unseen presence. Not only does the quotidian title situate the viewer geographically, the looming streetlamp visible in the left side of the composition offers an inescapable awareness of the Anthropocene, at once an imposition on the landscape and an integral part of it. The deep, heavy tonalities of 'Near A Petrol Station', 'Court Behind Trees' and Torres Del Paine Study I' are at once gloomy and luminous, alien and yet, in their natural formations, hauntingly familiar. This layered, tonal style is present in works beyond deep oils, such as 'Ogwen Seeing Stones, 1 Of 4 Variable Edition', with delicate linework and evocative scene-making, blurring the line between the perceived and the imagined. Edward is a 2023 City and Guilds of London Art School graduate.
Edward Jones is a contemporary landscape painter, b.2000 in Leeds, England. With a heavy emphasis on depicting mountainous regions, he explores familiar areas of Snowdonia as well as those further afield, using an analogue camera to capture moments from his expeditions. A prolific output of photography, drawing and painting leads to large scale oil paintings on canvas. Layering tonally similar colours, which he works up to achieve a darkness in the palette that produces an ambiguous sense of light, Jones’ depicted subjects are not fixed in a specific time or space. Non- systematic patterns are embedded into the final layer, a form of surface camouflage that encourages the pictorial experience to unravel over time. The introspective, quiet and foreboding images respond to long exposure within cold and bleak environments, contrasting the character of London, where Jones now lives and works. His alliance with the desolation and wilderness of sparsely or uninhabited spaces are examples of escapism, reclaiming the memories of his earlier life. Manifesting notions of the connections between land and culture from Peter Davidson’s book, Idea of North helped to formalise Jones’ spiritual attraction of the ‘dearth uplands’ of the northern hemisphere. Jones also feels the importance of having authorship over the landscape, exploring its relationship with set design and methods of producing a natural arena. Activated by the legacy of post-romantic landscape painting; the work and rational of the Group of Seven and the Nabis and have enriched Jones’ judgements to venerate the natural world whilst still giving space to amplify mood and emotive response. Where a romanticised view on his work may be applicable, the paintings are rather about formal decision making in his studio, and discreet chromatic choices in an arrangement of landscape tropes.