Earlier this year, artist Laura Jones became the 12th woman to win the country’s most prestigious art award, the Archibald Prize, for her portrait of author and activist Tim Winton. “I was blown away that he’d never been painted before,” says Jones, speaking to Broadsheet in her light-filled studio in Sydney. “Like me, he’s not someone who loves being photographed.”
Jones approached the Cloudstreet writer after watching his ABC documentary Ningaloo Nyinggulu, which she says was a hopeful take on the climate crisis – one that made her want to revisit the topic in her own work. “He didn’t place himself at the centre – and I really admired that. It reminded me of when I had done my Great Barrier Reef series and worked alongside scientists on Lizard Island and Heron Island … That documentary, and everything Tim Winton does, put the wind up me to revisit it again.”
Jones was working on her Great Barrier Reef series, Bleached, when Broadsheet visited her studio in 2017. Today she’s working on a more personal show, Interior Monologue, which focuses on the safety and intimacy of home. Her work-in-progress canvases are filled with pincushion proteas, pink orchids and flannel flowers, just like her studio. There’s a landscape painting of the artist’s hometown of Kurrajong, 75 kilometres north-west of Sydney, leaning against one of the walls. Paint smatterings cover every inch of the floorboards, and there are sketches and water colours on a long wooden table.
“Painting for me is a real outlet. I do it because I want to feel that spark that you get when you see something beautiful that you love, and that’s it. In my meeting with Tim Winton he said quite a few times ‘the purpose of art is not to persuade but to enchant’ and that was huge for me.”
Jones’s mum grows and picks flowers in Kurrajong, where the artist recently moved back to. “I just want to get my hands dirty again,” she says. “But I also love the city and the contrast, also the art community.”
Her studio is several floors above a nightclub, a judo centre and other artist studios – including Ondine Seabrook, Holly Greenwood and Jasper Knight’s. “I love having other painters nearby, it’s a beautiful thing to be able to give each other perspective.”
Though she works across a number of mediums, including monotypes – “immediate, fast print-making” – the larger oil-paint canvases are what she’s known for. As a former florist, her eye is on the natural world as a starting point but her subjects have covered actors, authors, coral reef, tennis courts and the domestic world. “I’ve always been interested in the domestic interior and that long history of still life,” she says. “That yearning for a grounded, safe space and that longing for a beautiful place where you bring nature into your home.”
Why oil paint? “Because of the intensity of colour you can achieve really quickly. This painting will eventually have a really lovely background texture because I’ve scraped it off, and because the mistakes are in there. I love how malleable it is; how you can really manipulate it, layer it, it can be thin or thick. It’s such a beautiful and difficult material.”
Her most-prized artwork, though, might just be her workbench. It’s caked in dried oil paint from years of painting, like a vivid sculpture. “That’s my ultimate artwork. I mean, all paintings are part of a bigger process of learning and that table really encapsulates 10 years of experimentation. Maybe I should just work on that? Throw the paintings out.”
Laura Jones: Interior Monologue is on now at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, until November 16. She’s represented by Chalk Horse in Sydney.
Read more in our Studio Visit series.
