Latest news with #LucyJones
CNN
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
Painter Lucy Jones puts her life with cerebral palsy on canvas
Lucy Jones painted her first nude self-portrait at 50. She was in New York with her husband Peter Leach, she said, when he 'took a picture of my backside. I thought, 'Well I don't look too bad from the back, so maybe I'll paint it!'' Jones is sitting on a wooden chair the middle of a white-washed gallery space, surrounded by a collection of her own works spanning decades for the opening of a new self-portraiture show in London. While the piece in question, 'Being 50,' is absent from the exhibition it is striking enough to remember off by heart: an inky black canvas split in two, with Jones' tilted gait rendered nude in two separate images. The study of the artists' front is flat and naïvely painted — her right arm bent backwards at an awkward right angle. (Jones was diagnosed with cerebral palsy — a lifelong brain disorder that permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination — as a young infant.) Her back profile, however, is more elegantly shaded with her spine gently curved to the left, hips following. An image of a wooden cane pokes up from the bottom to divide the painting while a floating constellation of deviled eggs looms above her head — a nod to menopause and losing her fertility. Painting nude is not Jones' usual approach to documenting her physical form. In fact, after her 50th portrait, she didn't create another one until sixteen years later. Why? Because she was finally a pensioner. 'Lucky me!' Jones laughed, as she spoke with CNN in the gallery. 'At last, I've made it.' She was still painting herself, however — on large canvases with a fearless approach to color. These are the reflections of Jones we glimpse in the show, who despite her obvious talent 'didn't really expect anybody to ever be interested in (my) self portraits,' she said. 'But it was a way for me to keep drawing.' In 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones,' the artists' physical disability is rendered in bright, brash Hockney-esque colors and confident, expressionist brush strokes. 'Most art historically never mentions disability,' said Jones. 'But I've been really quite interested to bring that onto the canvas. And over the years I think I have.' Her walking frame and cane are repeating motifs, as are backwards words and sentences — a nod to her invisible struggle with dyslexia, and an attempt at sharing that experience with her viewers. 'I usually do mirror writing on the painting to make it awkward for the audience to decipher it,' she explained. She often appears with stiff, distorted hands. Hands, Jones said, are the window in the soul. 'They express so much of the person,' she said. Jones' wit shows through in the titles of her artworks, which often refer to her experience as a person living with disabilities. In 'It's a Long Way to the Bottom of this Canvas' (2000), Jones is suspended in the top right corner, her glasses and cane woefully mid-flight down the painting. 'It could be a metaphor for life,' she said. 'Or for me, walking, anywhere. It's a long way.' There's a sardonic edge slicing through the work. The title of her 2018 piece 'With a Handicap like Yours…', is lifted verbatim from a conversation Jones once had with a doctor who, after Jones complained of her lack of dexterity, was reluctant to give the artist physiotherapy for her hand. In Jones' mind, the phrase also translated to 'What do you expect?' 'He was a lovely doctor, I'm not criticizing,' she conceded. 'But it was an old-fashioned expression. I wanted to poke that a little bit.' In the work, Jones is on the brink of an eye roll, her face angled towards the viewer in an exhausted stare. As a retort, she painted a third hand reaching into the painting — a surrealist quip. '(My art) gets more and more confrontational because I want to comment to the world and make them think about disability and different types of disability,' she said. The earliest work in the show dates back to 1996, when Jones could work on larger, more monumental pieces and stand for longer periods of time. 'The idea of standing doesn't appeal to me anymore,' she laughed. Now, the artist paints on her knees, which has meant downsizing her canvases to ensure she can 'still reach the top.' The discomfort from being on her feet means Jones must also now paint her self-portraits from photographs, instead of in front of the mirror. She called Matthew Flowers, the British art dealer and managing director of Flowers Gallery, 'brave' for staging her show. Not just because it centers someone like Jones so audaciously, but because Flowers rebukes the industry's perpetual appetite for novelty and constant creation. 'They're not all new paintings,' the artist said. 'Most of them go back a long time.' For Jones, creating an entire new body of work for a gallery show, when a single painting takes her three months, is unthinkable. Her newest piece, created this year, is the third in her age-based trilogy, marking the artist at 70. The work shows a self-portrait of Jones on all fours looking up at the viewer, while in the top right corner is a clipping from a leaflet attributed to The Centre for Spastic Children in Cheyne Walk. On the leaflet, a photograph of Jones shows her again on her hands and knees — this time at three years old, learning to crawl for the first time. Jones does not see the parallel as a melancholy one. Seventy is its own milestone, and many surprising, wonderful things have happened in between, she said. For Jones, reaching this point 'is a shock' because 'I didn't realize that with cerebral palsy you deteriorate. And let me tell you, you do. Which is rubbish, actually. Complete rubbish.' What age might she like to commemorate next, 99? '99!' She laughed. 'Paint myself in a coffin or something.' 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones' runs until August at the Flowers Gallery in Mayfair, London.
CNN
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘They get more confrontational': A painter's self-portraits capture life, and art, with cerebral palsy through the years
Lucy Jones painted her first nude self-portrait at 50. She was in New York with her husband Peter Leach, she said, when he 'took a picture of my backside. I thought, 'Well I don't look too bad from the back, so maybe I'll paint it!'' Jones is sitting on a wooden chair the middle of a white-washed gallery space, surrounded by a collection of her own works spanning decades for the opening of a new self-portraiture show in London. While the piece in question, 'Being 50,' is absent from the exhibition it is striking enough to remember off by heart: an inky black canvas split in two, with Jones' tilted gait rendered nude in two separate images. The study of the artists' front is flat and naïvely painted — her right arm bent backwards at an awkward right angle. (Jones was diagnosed with cerebral palsy — a lifelong brain disorder that permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination — as a young infant.) Her back profile, however, is more elegantly shaded with her spine gently curved to the left, hips following. An image of a wooden cane pokes up from the bottom to divide the painting while a floating constellation of deviled eggs looms above her head — a nod to menopause and losing her fertility. Painting nude is not Jones' usual approach to documenting her physical form. In fact, after her 50th portrait, she didn't create another one until sixteen years later. Why? Because she was finally a pensioner. 'Lucky me!' Jones laughed, as she spoke with CNN in the gallery. 'At last, I've made it.' She was still painting herself, however — on large canvases with a fearless approach to color. These are the reflections of Jones we glimpse in the show, who despite her obvious talent 'didn't really expect anybody to ever be interested in (my) self portraits,' she said. 'But it was a way for me to keep drawing.' In 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones,' the artists' physical disability is rendered in bright, brash Hockney-esque colors and confident, expressionist brush strokes. 'Most art historically never mentions disability,' said Jones. 'But I've been really quite interested to bring that onto the canvas. And over the years I think I have.' Her walking frame and cane are repeating motifs, as are backwards words and sentences — a nod to her invisible struggle with dyslexia, and an attempt at sharing that experience with her viewers. 'I usually do mirror writing on the painting to make it awkward for the audience to decipher it,' she explained. She often appears with stiff, distorted hands. Hands, Jones said, are the window in the soul. 'They express so much of the person,' she said. Jones' wit shows through in the titles of her artworks, which often refer to her experience as a person living with disabilities. In 'It's a Long Way to the Bottom of this Canvas' (2000), Jones is suspended in the top right corner, her glasses and cane woefully mid-flight down the painting. 'It could be a metaphor for life,' she said. 'Or for me, walking, anywhere. It's a long way.' There's a sardonic edge slicing through the work. The title of her 2018 piece 'With a Handicap like Yours…', is lifted verbatim from a conversation Jones once had with a doctor who, after Jones complained of her lack of dexterity, was reluctant to give the artist physiotherapy for her hand. In Jones' mind, the phrase also translated to 'What do you expect?' 'He was a lovely doctor, I'm not criticizing,' she conceded. 'But it was an old-fashioned expression. I wanted to poke that a little bit.' In the work, Jones is on the brink of an eye roll, her face angled towards the viewer in an exhausted stare. As a retort, she painted a third hand reaching into the painting — a surrealist quip. '(My art) gets more and more confrontational because I want to comment to the world and make them think about disability and different types of disability,' she said. The earliest work in the show dates back to 1996, when Jones could work on larger, more monumental pieces and stand for longer periods of time. 'The idea of standing doesn't appeal to me anymore,' she laughed. Now, the artist paints on her knees, which has meant downsizing her canvases to ensure she can 'still reach the top.' The discomfort from being on her feet means Jones must also now paint her self-portraits from photographs, instead of in front of the mirror. She called Matthew Flowers, the British art dealer and managing director of Flowers Gallery, 'brave' for staging her show. Not just because it centers someone like Jones so audaciously, but because Flowers rebukes the industry's perpetual appetite for novelty and constant creation. 'They're not all new paintings,' the artist said. 'Most of them go back a long time.' For Jones, creating an entire new body of work for a gallery show, when a single painting takes her three months, is unthinkable. Her newest piece, created this year, is the third in her age-based trilogy, marking the artist at 70. The work shows a self-portrait of Jones on all fours looking up at the viewer, while in the top right corner is a clipping from a leaflet attributed to The Centre for Spastic Children in Cheyne Walk. On the leaflet, a photograph of Jones shows her again on her hands and knees — this time at three years old, learning to crawl for the first time. Jones does not see the parallel as a melancholy one. Seventy is its own milestone, and many surprising, wonderful things have happened in between, she said. For Jones, reaching this point 'is a shock' because 'I didn't realize that with cerebral palsy you deteriorate. And let me tell you, you do. Which is rubbish, actually. Complete rubbish.' What age might she like to commemorate next, 99? '99!' She laughed. 'Paint myself in a coffin or something.' 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones' runs until August at the Flowers Gallery in Soho, London.
CNN
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘They get more confrontational': A painter's self-portraits capture life, and art, with cerebral palsy through the years
Lucy Jones painted her first nude self-portrait at 50. She was in New York with her husband Peter Leach, she said, when he 'took a picture of my backside. I thought, 'Well I don't look too bad from the back, so maybe I'll paint it!'' Jones is sitting on a wooden chair the middle of a white-washed gallery space, surrounded by a collection of her own works spanning decades for the opening of a new self-portraiture show in London. While the piece in question, 'Being 50,' is absent from the exhibition it is striking enough to remember off by heart: an inky black canvas split in two, with Jones' tilted gait rendered nude in two separate images. The study of the artists' front is flat and naïvely painted — her right arm bent backwards at an awkward right angle. (Jones was diagnosed with cerebral palsy — a lifelong brain disorder that permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination — as a young infant.) Her back profile, however, is more elegantly shaded with her spine gently curved to the left, hips following. An image of a wooden cane pokes up from the bottom to divide the painting while a floating constellation of deviled eggs looms above her head — a nod to menopause and losing her fertility. Painting nude is not Jones' usual approach to documenting her physical form. In fact, after her 50th portrait, she didn't create another one until sixteen years later. Why? Because she was finally a pensioner. 'Lucky me!' Jones laughed, as she spoke with CNN in the gallery. 'At last, I've made it.' She was still painting herself, however — on large canvases with a fearless approach to color. These are the reflections of Jones we glimpse in the show, who despite her obvious talent 'didn't really expect anybody to ever be interested in (my) self portraits,' she said. 'But it was a way for me to keep drawing.' In 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones,' the artists' physical disability is rendered in bright, brash Hockney-esque colors and confident, expressionist brush strokes. 'Most art historically never mentions disability,' said Jones. 'But I've been really quite interested to bring that onto the canvas. And over the years I think I have.' Her walking frame and cane are repeating motifs, as are backwards words and sentences — a nod to her invisible struggle with dyslexia, and an attempt at sharing that experience with her viewers. 'I usually do mirror writing on the painting to make it awkward for the audience to decipher it,' she explained. She often appears with stiff, distorted hands. Hands, Jones said, are the window in the soul. 'They express so much of the person,' she said. Jones' wit shows through in the titles of her artworks, which often refer to her experience as a person living with disabilities. In 'It's a Long Way to the Bottom of this Canvas' (2000), Jones is suspended in the top right corner, her glasses and cane woefully mid-flight down the painting. 'It could be a metaphor for life,' she said. 'Or for me, walking, anywhere. It's a long way.' There's a sardonic edge slicing through the work. The title of her 2018 piece 'With a Handicap like Yours…', is lifted verbatim from a conversation Jones once had with a doctor who, after Jones complained of her lack of dexterity, was reluctant to give the artist physiotherapy for her hand. In Jones' mind, the phrase also translated to 'What do you expect?' 'He was a lovely doctor, I'm not criticizing,' she conceded. 'But it was an old-fashioned expression. I wanted to poke that a little bit.' In the work, Jones is on the brink of an eye roll, her face angled towards the viewer in an exhausted stare. As a retort, she painted a third hand reaching into the painting — a surrealist quip. '(My art) gets more and more confrontational because I want to comment to the world and make them think about disability and different types of disability,' she said. The earliest work in the show dates back to 1996, when Jones could work on larger, more monumental pieces and stand for longer periods of time. 'The idea of standing doesn't appeal to me anymore,' she laughed. Now, the artist paints on her knees, which has meant downsizing her canvases to ensure she can 'still reach the top.' The discomfort from being on her feet means Jones must also now paint her self-portraits from photographs, instead of in front of the mirror. She called Matthew Flowers, the British art dealer and managing director of Flowers Gallery, 'brave' for staging her show. Not just because it centers someone like Jones so audaciously, but because Flowers rebukes the industry's perpetual appetite for novelty and constant creation. 'They're not all new paintings,' the artist said. 'Most of them go back a long time.' For Jones, creating an entire new body of work for a gallery show, when a single painting takes her three months, is unthinkable. Her newest piece, created this year, is the third in her age-based trilogy, marking the artist at 70. The work shows a self-portrait of Jones on all fours looking up at the viewer, while in the top right corner is a clipping from a leaflet attributed to The Centre for Spastic Children in Cheyne Walk. On the leaflet, a photograph of Jones shows her again on her hands and knees — this time at three years old, learning to crawl for the first time. Jones does not see the parallel as a melancholy one. Seventy is its own milestone, and many surprising, wonderful things have happened in between, she said. For Jones, reaching this point 'is a shock' because 'I didn't realize that with cerebral palsy you deteriorate. And let me tell you, you do. Which is rubbish, actually. Complete rubbish.' What age might she like to commemorate next, 99? '99!' She laughed. 'Paint myself in a coffin or something.' 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones' runs until August at the Flowers Gallery in Soho, London.
CNN
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘They get more confrontational': A painter's self-portraits capture life, and art, with cerebral palsy through the years
Lucy Jones painted her first nude self-portrait at 50. She was in New York with her husband Peter Leach, she said, when he 'took a picture of my backside. I thought, 'Well I don't look too bad from the back, so maybe I'll paint it!'' Jones is sitting on a wooden chair the middle of a white-washed gallery space, surrounded by a collection of her own works spanning decades for the opening of a new self-portraiture show in London. While the piece in question, 'Being 50,' is absent from the exhibition it is striking enough to remember off by heart: an inky black canvas split in two, with Jones' tilted gait rendered nude in two separate images. The study of the artists' front is flat and naïvely painted — her right arm bent backwards at an awkward right angle. (Jones was diagnosed with cerebral palsy — a lifelong brain disorder that permanently affects body movement and muscle coordination — as a young infant.) Her back profile, however, is more elegantly shaded with her spine gently curved to the left, hips following. An image of a wooden cane pokes up from the bottom to divide the painting while a floating constellation of deviled eggs looms above her head — a nod to menopause and losing her fertility. Painting nude is not Jones' usual approach to documenting her physical form. In fact, after her 50th portrait, she didn't create another one until sixteen years later. Why? Because she was finally a pensioner. 'Lucky me!' Jones laughed, as she spoke with CNN in the gallery. 'At last, I've made it.' She was still painting herself, however — on large canvases with a fearless approach to color. These are the reflections of Jones we glimpse in the show, who despite her obvious talent 'didn't really expect anybody to ever be interested in (my) self portraits,' she said. 'But it was a way for me to keep drawing.' In 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones,' the artists' physical disability is rendered in bright, brash Hockney-esque colors and confident, expressionist brush strokes. 'Most art historically never mentions disability,' said Jones. 'But I've been really quite interested to bring that onto the canvas. And over the years I think I have.' Her walking frame and cane are repeating motifs, as are backwards words and sentences — a nod to her invisible struggle with dyslexia, and an attempt at sharing that experience with her viewers. 'I usually do mirror writing on the painting to make it awkward for the audience to decipher it,' she explained. She often appears with stiff, distorted hands. Hands, Jones said, are the window in the soul. 'They express so much of the person,' she said. Jones' wit shows through in the titles of her artworks, which often refer to her experience as a person living with disabilities. In 'It's a Long Way to the Bottom of this Canvas' (2000), Jones is suspended in the top right corner, her glasses and cane woefully mid-flight down the painting. 'It could be a metaphor for life,' she said. 'Or for me, walking, anywhere. It's a long way.' There's a sardonic edge slicing through the work. The title of her 2018 piece 'With a Handicap like Yours…', is lifted verbatim from a conversation Jones once had with a doctor who, after Jones complained of her lack of dexterity, was reluctant to give the artist physiotherapy for her hand. In Jones' mind, the phrase also translated to 'What do you expect?' 'He was a lovely doctor, I'm not criticizing,' she conceded. 'But it was an old-fashioned expression. I wanted to poke that a little bit.' In the work, Jones is on the brink of an eye roll, her face angled towards the viewer in an exhausted stare. As a retort, she painted a third hand reaching into the painting — a surrealist quip. '(My art) gets more and more confrontational because I want to comment to the world and make them think about disability and different types of disability,' she said. The earliest work in the show dates back to 1996, when Jones could work on larger, more monumental pieces and stand for longer periods of time. 'The idea of standing doesn't appeal to me anymore,' she laughed. Now, the artist paints on her knees, which has meant downsizing her canvases to ensure she can 'still reach the top.' The discomfort from being on her feet means Jones must also now paint her self-portraits from photographs, instead of in front of the mirror. She called Matthew Flowers, the British art dealer and managing director of Flowers Gallery, 'brave' for staging her show. Not just because it centers someone like Jones so audaciously, but because Flowers rebukes the industry's perpetual appetite for novelty and constant creation. 'They're not all new paintings,' the artist said. 'Most of them go back a long time.' For Jones, creating an entire new body of work for a gallery show, when a single painting takes her three months, is unthinkable. Her newest piece, created this year, is the third in her age-based trilogy, marking the artist at 70. The work shows a self-portrait of Jones on all fours looking up at the viewer, while in the top right corner is a clipping from a leaflet attributed to The Centre for Spastic Children in Cheyne Walk. On the leaflet, a photograph of Jones shows her again on her hands and knees — this time at three years old, learning to crawl for the first time. Jones does not see the parallel as a melancholy one. Seventy is its own milestone, and many surprising, wonderful things have happened in between, she said. For Jones, reaching this point 'is a shock' because 'I didn't realize that with cerebral palsy you deteriorate. And let me tell you, you do. Which is rubbish, actually. Complete rubbish.' What age might she like to commemorate next, 99? '99!' She laughs. 'Paint myself in a coffin or something.' 'totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones' runs until August at the Flowers Gallery in Soho, London.
San Francisco Chronicle
07-06-2025
- Science
- San Francisco Chronicle
Study says California is overdue for a major earthquake. Does that mean ‘the big one' is coming?
Unlike other earthquake-prone places around the planet, California is overdue for a major quake, according to a recent study. But that doesn't mean a catastrophic event like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is on the verge of striking. 'A fault's 'overdue' is not a loan payment overdue,' said Lucy Jones, founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society and a research associate at the California Institute of Technology, who wasn't part of the work. The new study reported that a large share of California faults have been running 'late,' based on the expected time span between damaging temblors. The researchers compiled a geologic data set of nearly 900 large earthquakes on active faults in Japan, Greece, New Zealand and the western United States, including California. Faults are cracks in the planet's crust, where giant slabs of earth, known as tectonic plates, meet. The Hayward Fault is slowly creeping in the East Bay and moves around 5 millimeters per year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But sometimes plates get stuck and pressure builds. Earthquakes occur when plates suddenly slip, producing a jolt of energy that causes the ground to shake. Scientists study ruptured rock layers deep beneath the surface to estimate when large earthquakes occurred in the past. In the new study, the authors collected data stretching back tens of thousands of years. For a region spanning the Great Basin to northern Mexico, this paleoearthquake record stretched back about 80,000 years. For California, the record extended back about 5,000 years. The scientists used these records to calculate how much time typically passes between large surface-rupturing earthquakes around the planet. The average interval was around 100 years for some sites on the San Andreas Fault; it was 2,100 years on the less famous Compton thrust fault beneath the Los Angeles area. About 45% of the faults analyzed for California are running behind schedule for a major earthquake, meaning that more time has passed since the last large quake on a fault than the historical average. In the other regions studied, this statistic ranged from 9% to 18%. The researchers' analysis only included large surface-rupturing earthquakes. It didn't include the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which was below the magnitude 7 threshold that the study authors used for quakes on the San Andreas Fault. The authors associated seismic punctuality with slip rates, or how fast the two sides of a fault move past each other. 'Our analysis showed that the faster the faults are moving, the more likely it is that they will appear overdue,' said study author Vasiliki Mouslopoulou, a senior scientist at the National Observatory of Athens, in Greece. In tectonically active California, the San Andreas Fault has a particularly high slip rate. The Pacific and North American plates slide past each other an average of more than inch per year in some spots. 'Faults in California are among the fastest-slipping faults in the world,' Mouslopoulou said, adding that other factors are also probably contributing due to the pattern of chronically late large earthquakes. Previous studies had also shown that seismic activity has been unusually subdued in California, compared with paleorecords. A 2019 study reported that there's been a 100-year hiatus in ground-rupturing earthquakes at a number of paleoseismic sites in California, including on the San Andreas and Hayward faults. The authors of the 2019 study treated large earthquakes at these sites as independent events, akin to flipping pennies and counting how many turn up heads. They calculated a 0.3% probability that there'd be a 100-year hiatus in ground-rupturing quakes across all the California sites. Scientists have suggested that there could be earthquake 'supercycles,' with large quakes occurring in clusters, with less active periods in between. 'There are these longer-term, decadal, century-long ups and downs in the rate of earthquakes,' Jones said. Potentially, California is in a quiet time and large earthquakes are currently less likely. Katherine Scharer, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist who wasn't part of the new research, commended the authors of the study, explaining that compiling the paleoseismic records was a 'tremendous amount of work' and will enable more scientists to investigate earthquakes. California's relatively sparse big earthquake activity could be connected to the geometry of its faults. While the analyzed faults in California were more or less in line with each other, those in other regions resembled 'a plate of spaghetti,' Scharer said. 'From the study, I think you would say that the main California faults are mechanically different somehow than the averages from these other places,' Glenn Biasi, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who wasn't part of the new work. Biasi emphasized that it's impossible to say if California's faults are truly overdue for a big earthquake. 'The faults slip on their own schedule and for their own reasons,' Biasi said. Scientists can't accurately predict large earthquakes in advance but paleoearthquake data could help. The authors of the new study found that, excluding California's recent lack of large earthquakes, faults around the entire planet have generally produced surface-rupturing quakes at intervals expected from paleoearthquake and historic records. Considering such data could improve earthquake forecasts, Mouslopoulou said.
