Over five decades, Jones has built a remarkable career in painting, creating a phenomenal oeuvre of searing, poignant and playful portraits of loved ones and acquaintances, and uplifting landscapes that make the spirit sing. Her current exhibition at Flowers Gallery on Cork Street, however, is dedicated to another important facet to her work, her unflinching, searing and confrontational self-portraits, in which Jones faces herself and the world. Drawing on thirty years of paintings, ‘totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones’ reveals how Jones has developed her inimitable visual style, with her distinctive palette, energetic and suggestive brushwork, and sense of humour. The most recent painting included, completed this year, is titled “Lucy at 70 – and it started so well!”

Matthew Flowers, Managing Director of Flowers gallery, has a unique relationship with artist – the two have worked together for almost four decades. He said: “Lucy Jones is one of the most distinctive voices in British painting today. Her work is fearless and unflinching, rooted in her own lived experience, and has continually challenged how we see portraiture, self‑portraiture, and landscape. Over the decades, Lucy has developed a body of work that is as intimate as it is expansive, confronting the viewer directly in her self‑portraits, turning the gaze back on us with honesty, wit, and a deep humanity. Her landscapes, by contrast, carry an openness and searching spirit, capturing the vastness of the world while remaining deeply personal. At Flowers Gallery, we are proud to have supported Lucy since her Artist of the Day presentation in 1986, and to have witnessed her extraordinary journey marked by courage, and an ever‑evolving vision. Her current exhibition, ‘totally, completely, and absolutely Lucy Jones,’ is a powerful testament to her enduring contribution to contemporary art.”

One of the many compelling qualities of Jones’ work — which is held in the collections of the Arts Council, the National Portrait Gallery, the MET in New York, among many more – is her ability to be both vulnerable to the viewer, and her sense of fearlessness. She confronts the viewer with her physical discomfort and awkwardness, at times, but also the erotic, tender and beautiful. Just as in her portraits of others — such as Tom Shakespeare, her husband Peter, or the artist Grayson Perry – she had a gift, an instinct, for drawing out the essence of her subject’s emotional state and psyche. Motifs of hands, shadows, silhouettes and mirror writing (a method she learned to help with severe dyslexia she has experienced she childhood) also point to the invisible, hidden and closed off bits – not so easy to see, but sensed. Each of her works is a brilliantly coloured jewel gleaming with determination and defiance, a demand to be seen and to make space for difference.