Ever since I say the Jones exhibition in the National Gallery London in 2004, I have sought out his work wherever I go. Immediately connecting with the structure of the paintings, the pictorial format and visual directness, his work resonates in a contemporary way that crosses the intervening decades. I encountered Buildings in Naples, with the North-East Side of the Castel Nuovo in the Constable exhibition at the V & A Museum in December 2014 and I was thrilled to see that it was one of the National Museum Cardiff works and therefore eligible for the project. It is an outstanding painting and the colour resonated across its surface with deep greens, greys, blues and ochres in an orchestration of composition. It also is of a defined place in Naples, interesting as many of the Jones’ Naples series are of anonymous backstreets with washing hanging over balconies, corners and walls punctuated by dark window recesses always with a feeling of the passage of time.

 

I wanted to get as close as possible to Jones’s visual thinking; to interact with his mind - as much as such a thing is possible. What happens with these paintings (as happens with all great painting) is that there is a characteristic of continuity. The view from the window is there for our eyes to stare at; its nothing really special. An everyday urban rooftop, with notable landmarks but present only by chance. Each time we look it is familiar but different. The drying cloths have moved or the light has changed even though it is the same time of day or perhaps the trees are moving in the breeze.

 

I looked closely at the Jones by having an A3 size copy in the studio next to my easel for constant reference. Increasingly over time it was the structure of the image that needed to be closely analysed. There is a precision and geometry about the Naples series that adds to the compelling totality of the image; the walls, rooftops and spaces are clearly defined and absolutely relational. I read that examination with infra red light of my Jones painting had revealed extensive pencil underdrawing. This information was crucial to my progress as I had always considered the Naples paintings to be sketches on paper made just before the artists left Naples for the last time. I returned to the painting itself and deconstructed its geometry as the next stage of my encounter with this paradoxically distant yet so near modern artist.

 

I drew a grid like form over the main structural points on one of the photocopies of the painting.

 These structures included the edge of the walls (verticals) and tops of parapets (horizontals). It became apparent immediately that what I had been observing in a non-objective way was in fact a geometric order. The main vertical and horizontal lines in the central sections of the painting formed a near-square vertical rectangle.

 

Moreover, with my modern understanding of composition the centralisation of image and focal point (even using the square canvas) might in the least be problematic for an image that relies on contrast for any kind of dynamic. Here, Jones had gone for the geometric centre of the painting as the main focal point; the washing curling in the wind almost exactly in the centre of the painting.

 

Further enquiry into symmetry included the rotation of the image and superimposition. This led to a development for a pictorial space that seemed to emphasise further geometries of the painting by creating through superimpositions of the roof through the long wall, an angular form with a direction toward the right and left edge of the painting and most significantly rectangular frames around the distant dome and parapet with a line running directly over the top of the parapet walls.

 

The superimposition gave me a compositional structure that was closer to my idea of painting by creating a dynamic between flatness and retained perspectival distance and allowing space to move across the entire surface of the painting. Further drawings developed as I mulled over these new discoveries and I resolved to make a large drawing to get the elements and forms in the right place with lines intersecting and the distant dome not too close to the central line and I realised that the compositional agenda for Jones was an essential part of his enquiry; he searched for the right image and had developed an eye for close analysis of the everyday to recognise and realise form.

 

The final painting built on the process of the drawing but introduced increased visual dynamic and freedoms in the exposure and perhaps celebration of the geometric form, planes and spaces, very close actually to my way of working and allowing with the increased canvas dimension for the interplay of shape, colour and brushmark, the fundamental elements of painting. All preconceptions and conscious considerations from the project fell away as the creative act of painting took control in the studio situation. I wonder now whether at some point during the making of this work that my thinking equated in any way with that of the artist looking at the rooftops in Naples over two hundred years before.