Robert Jones 'Remembered Places'

About

Private View: Friday 19th November, 17:30 – 19:30 All welcome!

'Remembered Places'
20th November 2021 - 29th December 2021

“In this exhibition I revisit subjects, themes and places that have meaning for me. The sea and weather are constant themes but I also make paintings of trees, birds and animals that have caught my eye in the landscape at home or during travels abroad.

I still live on the north coast of Cornwall where I was born and grew up. When I paint the sea it is the Atlantic; the impressions I’ve had since childhood are part of my life. As children we had extraordinary freedom to roam – the freedom to drown ourselves in the sea – almost; to fall to our deaths from cliffs – almost. At an early age I understood how weather and tides affect the sea. These early experiences are important and formative.

In the 1970s I spent seven years as the skipper of inshore commercial fishing boats, fishing from Hayle for lobsters and crab in summer and mackerel from Newlyn or Falmouth in winter. This experience has informed my paintings as well as my writing on Alfred Wallis whose paintings contain the historical, geographical and nautical information that I recognised and understood.

For me, if paintings are any good they work on many levels. I am conscious of the stuff of paint and the surface of the painting that often results from working and reworking. Of course, there is also the awareness of colour and tone and the moods they evoke.

Scale and proportion, intervals and relationships are the architecture of the painting so playing with positive and negative shapes is a sort of game, almost like playing chess against myself.

Painting is also about finding one’s own personal space and depth within the painting. I like it in that other world “inside the painting”, lost in my imagination – moving things around, making some things lighter and others darker. Some things can only be said in paint but most of all I hope to convey a feeling of life, energy and wit and perhaps create something that will endure.”

– Robert Jones