Featured Artist: Olwen Jones RWS
Experience the brilliance of watercolours which delight the eye and challenge the mind. This exhibition features a retrospective of paintings by Olwen Jones RWS. Olwen is inspired by botanical gardens and glass houses which she uses to create bold, yet calm and tranquil works. Take this opportunity to adorn your home with a beautiful original painting.
The Spring Show will take place at Bankside Gallery - the home of the Royal Watercolour Society.
Highlights from the RWS Spring Exhibition will be on show at The Assembly House, Norwich from
29th April – 11th May. The Assembly House, Theatre Street, Norwich NR2 1RQ
www.assemblyhousenorwich.co.uk / 01603 626402
Selected Images from the RWS Spring Exhibition
Featured Artist Olwen Jones RWS – An article by Richard Bawden RWS RE
Olwen Jones is an artist whose starting point is where her imagination responds to a visual image. “Good drawing is fundamental” she says. She makes numerous pen or pencil drawings on the spot; a fleeting image in a shop window, a man in a train, a Victorian cast iron balustrade, purple irises in a vase, or the fan-like spread of palm fronds. Her large, spacious upstairs studio, with light from all sides and spectacular views across the Roman River valley, is where she assembles her ideas.
Composing a large watercolour some images come forward, some recede, some reflected in a mirror or seen through an open door. There is a mysterious sequence to this logical process. There is a formal structure; often the verticals and horizontals of glass houses or conservatories. Fundamentally abstract, a grid may hold the design together; clean straight edges and implied flat planes. She starts with big, broad abstract shapes, taking images from several drawings and different points of view. The interior of a green house is sometimes implied, not fully stated, so there is a feeling of transient ambiguity; you will see something, yet something else will, so to speak, come into view. The eye is intrigued by this constant change. There may be vibrant areas where a patterned texture of palm fronds vibrate, to this there are added reflections, and double images through clear glass. All these might seem to confuse the eye, yet she produces a logical sequence of form and shape.
Her paintings require you to look at them. A train passing through a station: it is there, it is gone. A yellow interior with pale vertical window mullions, beyond which there are geometric triangular shapes which have a rhythmic design. She will take a crisp, hard shape yet paint it in the palest of tones. All her paintings have space through which you can move provided you don’t get entangled in some ghost like structure; large tropical leafed plants or yellow butterflies.
She is never afraid to use a strong green where it might be needed, and also deliberately leaves areas of white paper. In her travels, she tells me, she has visited most of the botanical gardens up and down the country, and many abroad.
Olwen was a student at Harrow School of Art, and the Royal Academy Schools, where she was awarded two silver medals for drawing, and two travelling scholarships for landscape painting. She received inspirational tuition from Gertrude Hermes, which led her into printmaking. She subsequently bought a large Columbian relief press, which is in her outside studio - a converted wash-house. Olwen is a dedicated full time artist, very single minded and disciplined, an early riser doing most of her creative work in the mornings. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-printmakers in 1971, and in 1989 a Fellow of the RWS, Olwen is an energetic and enthusiastic Member of both societies. She was Vice-President of the RWS 2004-2007. Bob (Charles) Bartlett her husband is her constant support, two Siamese cats dearly loved, and depicted in her bathroom mural, though they rarely appear in her paintings. The garden is a joy, with architectural plants, giant rhubarb, artichokes and, in front of their house, enormous sunflowers that stand like sentinels. Every visit to the house is exciting; always something new to look at, exotic plants in the conservatory or a table laid with flair using vibrant colour combinations. Olwen is a truly creative person, in her life and work.
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