Shropshire Magazine

-

Andy Richardson meets a young Shropshire artist who’s going places – including New York – fast

When other boys at Corbet School at Baschurch were busy playing Xbox, Oliver Jones was sitting on a bed in a friend’s room, copying pictures from books. The Shropshire artist had little interest in kicking footballs or hanging on street corners. His passion was for the perfect brushstroke.

In the few intervening years, Oliver has announced himself on the UK arts scene as one of the finest bright young things. He has already beaten 2,000 UK graduates in a competition run by London’s SaLon Gallery in Notting Hill. There, he was the artist chosen to exhibit at the White Box Gallery, in The UK’s Future Greats show, in New York. 

“Things are going well so far,” he says, humbly.

Oliver specialises in portraiture, in particular large chalk drawings on stretched paper. He eschews the beautiful and easy-on-the-eye in favour of the disagreeable and unprepossessing.

“This latest series that I’m doing is about people who others might feel some sort of angst towards, when they see them. The series includes a portrait of a man with a highly pierced face, Big Issue sellers and others who do not embody society’s idea of beauty.”

Oliver wanted to draw those faces to expose a wider audience to them. He wanted to provoke, upset and stimulate viewers. “I guess the subjects I selected are people who almost want your attention or time, yet people feel unobliged to look at them. I wanted people to look at these faces for a longer measure of time than they would otherwise do.

“Faces seem to be an international currency. They are on every passport, on billboards and credit cards. Yet the faces we see are always highly stylised. Often, they are manipulated so as to represent a particular idea of what is beautiful. I wanted to kick against that. And I drew them the same large size as advertisements, often 7ft tall, so that people would really look deeply at them.”

Oliver was raised at Myddle, near Baschurch, and attended the Corbet School. His art teachers were Jenny O’Leary and Sally Greenland, and he maintained contact with them when he progressed to sixth form in Shrewsbury, and later to the Margaret Street School of Art, which is part of Birmingham University. “I got a first,” says Oliver. “The school was in an amazing old building, like Hogwarts.”

Oliver favoured drawing over painting at school. He started to paint when he arrived at sixth form and then, at university, he spent long hours improving his drawing. 

“It’s just something that I’ve always done,” he says. “I used to sit on my mate’s bed, just copying pictures out of a book. It’s a matter of observing what’s there and critiquing the image as much as you can.”

That technique is still employed today, though Oliver isn’t looking to copy images with absolute precision. “I don’t really see my work as photorealistic,” he says. “It’s a lot more gestural. I build up an image with stroke after stroke after stroke. Even though the outcome is realistic representation, the realism comes from a build-up of the gestural marks.”

Oliver’s pictures are based on photographs. He takes between 60 and 70 stills of his subject, before copying them in chalk. He’s looking for natural poses and asks his sitters to speak to him while their photographs are being taken. 

“I don’t favour posed images,” he says. “That’s what it’s all about with digital photography and image manipulation. But, in my opinion, people get a false view. I like the snapshot, where you get an unposed and more natural image.

Oliver Jones demonstrates the scale of his works.

Similar

“I work from the photograph and do the larger image with chalk and pastels, on paper. I’ve been using chalks recently because the application of them is similar to the way we apply products, like moisturisers, onto our own faces.”

When Oliver left Margaret Street, he decided to launch himself as an artist as quickly as possible. He looked for studios and was offered slots alongside other groups of artists. However, he preferred to work alone and eventually agreed to rent space in somebody’s garage, in Harborne, Birmingham. “It worked out well,” he says. “The studios available were a lot smaller than the garage and now I’ve been here since I left university in July last year.”

When Oliver ended his course, he gave himself a year to establish himself. He’s made good progress and his life as a professional artist should soon pay his way.

He came to the attention of the art world after being invited to submit an application for the SaLon Gallery, in London’s Notting Hill. 

“2,000 people applied and they whittled it down to 20. They picked six from that for a ‘Best of the UK’ exhibition. When we went to the private viewing, they announced that they’d picked me as the winner, to exhibit at the White Box, in New York, in September. I was quite surprised. So now, I’ll be flying to New York for the exhibition.”

Life is a blur of competitions and exhibitions as Oliver continues to make his name. “It’s a peculiar process of application after application,” he adds.

Though he’s now living in Birmingham, he maintains his links with Shropshire. “I often go back to see Sally and Jenny and meet up with them. Shropshire is still home and I’d like to exhibit in the county at some point. I do commissions for people commercially, but these gestural portraits are not a commercial venture. I’m trying to get my concept out there and the more people that see them the better. It’s art for art’s sake.” v

• Further details are available at www.olivercjones.com