Room with a View | Dylan Jones
6 October - 24 October
Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Dylan Jones’s exhibition Room with a View, on show from 6 October - 24 October 2021.
Room with a View presents Jones’ first series of works painted with gouache, a significant departure from his typical oil paintings. Depicting the iconic landscape of Sydney Harbour, Jones looks away from its most famous sights and towards its ubiquitous coastlines. In these works, Jones creates soft, ephemeral scenes which invite the viewer to lull in their spacious compositions.
Jones states: As an artist, I believe it is imperative to push towards a new challenge rather than staying static. With this in mind, during early 2021 I deliberately placed myself amongst the iconic landscape of Sydney Harbour. An environment I previously would have deemed too beautiful to paint.
Throughout time, artists have been drawn to this site as a source of inspiration. Masters such as Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston and Brett Whiteley all depicted their unique vision and response to this place and reveal the harbour with a certain unimaginable brilliance. Room With A View offers a fresh take on the subject and allows me to make my own mark in this lineage. Each work portrays the harbour in a humbler light, granting me the tranquilly to digest the environment’s overwhelming beauty on my own terms.
Instead of seeking out the conventional ‘postcard vistas’ we are accustomed to seeing, I positioned my entire focus through the East facing window of my accommodation when painting each work. The physical act of distancing myself from the landscape allowed my viewpoint to become less site specific. I was able to respond to the immediacy of my surroundings in order to reimagine structures and scenes of the everyday in a new, ubiquitous setting. The paintings do not settle on an exact moment in time, but instead have an ephemeral quality. The approach is one of subtlety and softness, inviting the viewer to lull in each spacious composition.
— Dylan Jones, 2021