Lucy Jones Lead You Up the Garden Path, 2008

Lucy Jones is renowned for her richly coloured works, exploring the internal in her intimately personal portraits and the external in her expressively raw depictions of the British landscape.

Since her move to the Shropshire countryside in 2004, the artist has been working outdoors, placing a board on the ground and kneeling for several hours to create pastel or watercolour works, which become the basis for large paintings years later. For Jones, these intensive and often painfully uncomfortable sessions have brought emotional range to her work. Just as the moods and atmospheres of her portraits can be alternatively celebratory or dark and foreboding, so too can her landscapes. This is evident in the degree of looseness or sharpness of stroke and varying colour palettes she employs; in Lead You Up the Garden Path, 2008, Jones' choices are broadly subjective but equally evocative of the scene's climate and season.