Artospective: Portraiture Paintings by Sal Jones from London.

Here I Am, Inside, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm

An Interview with Sal Jones.

Who and where are you from?

My name is Sal Jones, I’m a contemporary figurative artist working predominantly with oil on canvas.Originally I’m from the East Midlands area but I have been in London for a long time now, I live and have a studio space in Hackney, London.

How you got into this?

I always created things from a young age (whether sticking things down, painting or cutting things up). I studied Fine Art at college and later did a PGCE in Art & Design Education. I have worked across various art forms and media in the past (including painting, assemblage sculpture, analogue and digital photography). As well as my art practices I have taught Art & Design, undertaken residencies in schools and work freelance in the Art & Design education sector.

What is your driving force?

I get a sense of satisfaction out of creating art and I enjoy seeing an image appear. The possibilities when a painting is only partially complete are really exciting - that’s where the energy comes from.

I like to think making art it is a form of communication with others, as the artist, I select the images and paint them in a way that perhaps says more about how I am feeling and the context in which they are created than I realise.

What kind of work you do and why?

The paintings I have been doing recently are best described as a reinterpretation of the portraiture tradition with an emphasis on emotional conflict and expression. But unlike traditional portraiture, there are no sitters and they do not represent a specific person but rather suggest an emotive state. They are not specifically posed but capture a moment in time. I hope to draw the viewer into an unknown scenario, one in which they are invited to speculate what the subject is thinking about.The paintings have been inspired by images of facial expressions appropriated from film, and the media, which have been taken out of context and re-presented as paintings, with an emphasis on colour, and mark making.

I have been using dialogue as titles to open up a line of communication between subject and spectator. I hope to interact with the viewer by creating works that they can relate to or empathise with on a personal level.

Please tell us more about your thought process.

I like to think of my paintings as a commentary on what it is like and how it feels to live or even just to exist in our times.

I don’t draw out the image in advance but work with thin washes of paint to plan out the image directly onto the canvas, once the composition is established I then work on layers of paint using brushes and palette knife.Experimenting with paint application is part of the process.

I usually start with a photograph or series of photos that I use as a resource to plan the composition and to get enough of the representation that I require – but that’s where it ends – I then use colour and mark-making to emphasise the expression and emotion of the subject, I’m not interested in a photo-realist finish. I suppose I sort of re-animate a photographic source through the painting process.