Lloyd Jones

b. 1932
My first life was as a scientist but after some years of post-doctoral research I took a job teaching chemistry at night-school in order to finance my studies at the Slade School of Art (UCL) during the day-time. This enabled me to switch to my first love, painting.. At first my work was straightforwardly figurative - landscapes for the most part but always based on a firm sense of structure, the legacy of the Slade drawing tradition.

Then came the Sixties and like so many of my generation I was caught up in one of the many waves of abstraction -in my case hard-edge. First pictures were much in the black-and-white mould following Vasareley but I soon developed a passion for colour which led to an intense study of the colour practice of Indian miniature paintings. This lead to my first solo exhibition 'A Sequence of Ragas'.

However it was not long before I became captivated by the narrative element in the Indian originals and it was this that led me back - after a long break when I earned my living as a design teacher - to the figurative tradition with which I began. Even when I was most intensely involved with running a busy department and simultaneously engaged in research which led to a couple of books I managed ...

First trained as a scientist (BSc Imperial College, PhD Kings College, Cambridge) then switched to painting via a stint as a part-time student at the Slade School UCL