Neal Jones (born Liverpool; 1969) studied at Canterbury College of Art and Design (now University of Creative Arts) and the Prince’s Drawing School (now The Royal Drawing School). He creates and exhibits works fashioned from items found in bins or from things left lying about including scrap wood, old tins, and plastic buckets and turns this into joyful, countercultural sculpture and painting, depicting figures, animals, landscape with humour and beauty.

 

In the artist’s own words written for his exhibition NATURE SCUM:

‘IS an aesthetic: sensual and philosophical.

IS a preference for the outdoors and LIFELINESS.

IS an attempt at TRADITIONAL landscape intoxication, FOLK ART cloddishness, and SWEET RELIGIOUS colour and formality.

IS an attempt at strange painterliness, good honest manufacturing, pleasure, recycling and poor hope.

IS marbling and slippage, surprising detail, errors welcomed in like strangers, balance, grungeiness and ECO love.

IS a self-deprecating description of ME as left wing greeny, spouting hippy bollocks.

IS a potential new term for a species indifferent to advertising platitudes, business and media tartistry.

IS trying to get beauty to make friends with ugliness.

IS ok about life that includes comedy and death.

IS whether you like it or not.

IS a description of all perceived to be lower than ourselves.

ALL the same: cats, worms, flies, humans: all funny, all needy, all greedy, all passing by.’[1]

 

[1] Press release for ‘Neal Jones, NATURE SCUM’, 24 August – 19 September 2015. Southard Reid, London http://www.southardreid.com/exhibitions/detail/jones-nature-scum/#

Glossary

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.