Ivan Maxwell Jones
Painting the Malverns
My passion for painting and my love of nature are intimately connected. I love to get out into the landscape in all weathers and soak up the sights, sounds and atmosphere of the natural world. I am particularly inspired by the light, colours and textures of the Malvern Hills, which are close to my home and my heart.
I paint mainly from my home studio using the sketches and photographs that I gather in my frequent hills walks. Each painting is an individual voyage of discovery for me and I try to see my surroundings in fresh way, to evoke a sense of character in the landscape and express the wonder I experience in the everyday.
Sometimes my work has a heightened realism, other times my landscapes are abstracted through colour, form and texture. I try to bring energy, movement and drama into my work through a vigorous painting process: by building up layers of paint using brushes, palette knifes, spattering, rubbing back, scratching and scraping away to create a textural surface with depth and history.
Web: www.ivanmjones.com • Email: Ivanjonesuk@yahoo.com • Instagram: @imaxjones
At first glance it appears that my art has two distinct characters and ostensibly my abstracts and my landscapes appear quite different. However each inspires and informs the other and my experimental approach and passion for colour, texture and composition is evident in both.
When painting abstracts I often work in an intuitive and gestural way, burying and unearthing marks, colours and textures, revealing glimpses of hidden colours in a highly layered surface. Sometimes these incorporate elements of collage and printing within the textured surface; I like to see where the mood takes me rather than developing a ‘house style’ and sticking to it.
Whether representational or purely abstract, my experimental approach to painting aims to find the sweet-spot between chaos and control, where mistakes become discoveries and a painting emerges through creative play.
With a Drama degree from Bristol Uni, and a previous career as a television editor making natural history programmes for BBC Bristol, my route to becoming a fine artist has been an unconventional one. Re-discovering my love of fine art about 19 years ago (via stained-glass making), I trained at the Bristol School of Art and then, after moving to Malvern in 2008, I spent 10 years as an Art Teacher. These days I share my time between painting and art tuition.