Lesley recalls fond childhood memories of many hours spent drawing and painting in the ‘art room’ with her siblings, under the tutelage of her mother, a highly regarded artist and teacher.  Whilst showing an early, natural ability to create imaginative artwork, Lesley veered her creativity instead to dramatic arts, developing a passion for musical theatre performance and direction and later, dance.

Many years later, realising that “something was missing” in her life, Lesley came across her son’s old school sketch book and started to draw again on the blank pages and the missing link was solved. Charcoal sketching quickly became “something I had to do every day” and from this, as Lesley’s imagination and confidence grew, she started to produce artwork in acrylics.

Now, when asked, Lesley humbly volunteers that she “paints a bit”. This is somewhat of an understatement; Lesley paints most days, finding inspiration and energy from ever changing skies and the beautiful countryside views surrounding her home in the Cotswolds and the atmospheric coastlines of her former home in the West Country, which she frequently returns to.  

Lesley works quickly on canvases, applying layer upon layer of colour and enjoying the “freedom and flow” of her favoured medium, acrylics. Her original and striking, contemporary landscapes and seascapes are vivid in colour capturing the emotions and feelings the sky, sea and land impress on her.

Martyn Jones is a contemporary painter who works from his studio based in Cardiff, Wales, U.K. Jones graduated M.A. Fine Art, at Chelsea School of Art, London and was awarded Junior Fellowship at Bath Academy of Art. Among his tutors were the British artists Patrick Heron and Adrian Heath.

His works are abstract, but the inspiration and basis for them are found in reality and the world around me. His experiences of the world are the prime material for abstraction, employing his personal alphabet of shapes and colour. His responses are really a stream of consciousness that he hopes evokes the way in which he sees the world,  always as a place of beauty. He celebrates vibrations or sound through the use of colour in painting. However,  sometimes works in silence, listening to the noise of the natural world and this again informs the shapes and colours that used.

A further sense comes in the use of saturated colour that you can almost taste. Jones paints expanses of colour but within these are small jewel-like accents of bright glimmering ultramarine, umber, violet or viridian creating deep sumptuous chromatic blacks on the canvas. Turquoise is often used and is a tranquil colour, transcendent, quiet and deep. One key motif in his work is the apparent chalk line. He see these as precious and fragile, it is time-consuming to achieve. They seem to be simple, a gesture made by a child in chalk, and Jones feels that he captures the spontaneity of a child’s drawing with them, however, these lines cannot be created with a single or continuous brushstroke, they are painstakingly made with a tiny brush. The overall effect has a sense of immediacy, but the creative process is very different to this.

Ultimately, his is searching for something unobtainable, a calm tranquillity, an impossible form of transcendence, a perfect existence and that is what brings him back to the canvas.