All photography provided by Lucy E. Jones

Working in my studio

My purpose built studio is small but perfectly formed. Designed to fit one of my largest paintings on the wall, I usually work on a table or on the floor. Set in the welsh countryside, It is an incredibly light space. After 15 years I have finally got wifi at the studio, no more avoiding people with the old excuse ‘sorry, I was at the studio’. I admit I love to work to music, quite often singing and dancing at the same time as painting. I love the contradiction of what I paint to the surroundings in which they are painted

My paintings can and often do take months to complete, so I work on several at once. despite being acrylic they take a deceptively long time to dry.

Processes

I have included photographic images as part of my work since I was a student at Winchester, and experimented with various ways of doing this over the years. Firstly collage, (unsatisfactory) I then moved onto photo-screenprinting directly onto the surface, which enabled the photograph to interlace with the layers of paint and become one with the painting. This was getting somewhere.

When I left university it was difficult to access facilities to do this on a large scale, so I developed my own method of image transfer using lazercopies and acrylic resin. At this time (1990's) it was not well known about and few artists used it, but being such a versatile process with so many applications and methods it has exploded in popularity. This is good news though because of the choice of acrylic resins now widely available. The image now is fully integrated into the work as it consists purely of toner and resin.

I pour, scrape and layer up, large quantities of acrylic paint and images. As with any process there is always an element of risk and unpredictability that throws up some interesting results. I decided to break a cardinal rule one day, that was to include oil bars/sticks into an acrylic painting. I wanted to get some drawn elements back into it. The results were fantastic. If you then pour acrylic paint over the top it gives you a wonderful ghost image.