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philip
jones contemporary artist |
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It was love at first sight. The only trouble was that I did not know whom or what I had fallen in love with. I knew right away that I had to have the painting of an abstracted curvilinear landscape the moment I saw it on a dealer’s wall. But he could not tell me anything further about the young painter; the signature ‘Philip Jones’ was all I had to go on. Maybe five years later, at an art fair, I came upon a whole clutch of work from unmistakably the same hand, and all was revealed. Since then I have followed Jones’s work with fanatical zeal, as he seems to me to be just about the best painter of his kind who is still around, still developing.
But then, what is his kind? Essentially he is sui generis. His work is all somehow connected with landscape, and his passionately individual responses to it. But the connections are often devious and complex. For Jones is, in his way, an abstractionist. When he looks at a landscape, whether in England, France, Greece or, as in his latest work, Gambia, it clearly assumes what Blake would have called a spiritual shape. And in this glimpse into the grain of things, panta rei, everything flows. The possibly angular facts of the time and place begin to curve and bend in on themselves. It is a timeless world that Jones evokes, where everything is in a constant state of change, yet nothing finally changes: the eternals of light and air and, above all, colour are firmly in place. Everything is free, yet everything is under the artist’s control.
And with every show Jones seems to move on. He explores further within his own sensibilities, and yet remains finely consistent with his earlier selves. With each new work we experience something completely new, and yet at a deeper level we seem to have known it all our life. John Russell Taylor 2003 Art Critic, The Times
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