Stewart Jones | (RE) TRACE : NEW PAINTINGS

Friday, June 16 - Saturday, July 8
Artist Reception: Saturday, June 17th @ 3-5 pm
with an artist talk at 3:30 pm
RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Wall Space Gallery is proud to present (RE)TRACE: NEW PAINTINGS, the latest body of urban landscape paintings by Stewart Jones. In this body of work, Jones captures scenes from his last year of travel between NYC, Toronto, Montreal, Prince Edward County, and Los Angeles. Jones' work focuses on the sidelines of the city and the relationships of light and shadows within the urban environment.

HOTEL HOTEL, HOLLYWOOD, Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. Framed by Wall Space

Through curated viewpoints, Jones captures the enigmatic character that makes urban-scapes unique. His dramatic cinematic perspectives draw us into the qualities of light and the peripheral natural and architectural structures that place us in a specific time and place. In this exhibition, Jones takes us on a journey following his own steps in a whirlwind of post-pandemic travel.

Jones’ palettes lean towards the gritty and brooding, relishing in the subtle transitions of hues in a paved roadway or building façade, and the broiling textures of a storm-clouded sky. The sensuousness of Jones’ thick applications of paint make the grungy tangible. Like a brick layer, his impasto technique builds stroke upon stroke to construct the sensation of a place.In URBAN
COMPOSITION, Jones balances between realism and abstraction. Paint is laid on so thick that marks press up against one another competing for the foreground. With a far-off horizon in the upper corner, the road rises up to meet us flattening the space into a map of shifting line, colour, and light.

Jones invites us to look up, down, out, and around, turning our attention to cracks and vistas alike. Using striking contrasts of shadows and off-kilter perspectives, he jars us into the moment. In his Los Angeles scenes such as SIDESTREET BLUES and URBAN FOLIAGE_SILVER LAKE, saturated blue skies offer wide-open pools of colour to dive into. Rather than being subdued to the background, their criss-crossing brushwork matches the energy of the foliage and roads around them.

Jones builds up his painted spaces to immediately capture the imagination through perspective, light and colour. His keen ability to translate the essence of a place we may have never visited allows us to retrace these places through the mind of the artist.

-Tiffany April, Curator

Capturing a sense of place; engaging with the idea that we are here now. These are the thoughts and concepts that motivate me towards a particular space and inspire a curiosity in that time and place. I seek a truth in the environment in which we live. I want to represent the spirit of the city. What happens in the shadows, and the shapes created by a cut of late afternoon light, all play out as the main elements of my compositions. Negative shapes in both sky and structure form the compositional backbone of my paintings. These create the balance that I believe is needed to put the viewer in a place of familiarity and in turn compose the narrative. You are now here and I want to leave you with this experience, for you to create and extend this narrative on your own.

- Stewart Jones

(RE)TRACE : NEW PAINTINGS

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Stewart Jones has extensive training in the arts with a four-year Associate diploma in Drawing and Painting
for OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) as well as having graduated from Sheridan College's prestigious Classical Animation program. Stewart has been involved in many projects over the last 10 years with work in commercials, animation industry, in addition to having many solo and group shows. Stewart
continues to paint from his travels and has exhibited from New York City, Chicago, Brooklyn, Havana, Glasgow, Paris, Bordeaux, London, Vancouver, Hamilton, and Toronto.