Ivan Maxwell Jones

Ivan Maxwell Jones

Malvern Link

There’s something about the Malverns and being out in nature that’s very hard to resist. I love to walk on the Malverns in all seasons, in all weathers, all times of day. I’m passionate about capturing in my paintings something of that natural wonder that I experience in the everyday.

Most of my more figurative pieces are very much about conveying a sense of place. It might be about capturing that particular moment where the light comes through the clouds, and hits the edge of the hills, or the evening sun lighting up the red sorrel in June. As well as trying to capture the drama, and that visual excitement that I feel in seeing the world around me, it’s also about conveying a sense of connectedness to a very ancient and sacred place that’s been somewhere that people have lived and visited and shared with other animals for a long time.

One of the best things about living here is seeing my children grow up in an environment where there’s easy access to such beautiful nature. Going on long family walks together on the Hills have been some of the happiest moments of my life. It’s not just, the dramatic hills however, inspiring though they are, but just as important on a smaller scale are the commons. We have seen deer, badgers, wild orchids, all sorts of birds and amazing flora and fauna on our local common, and all that just a few minutes from where we live. Fresh air, great walking and clean spring water; these things have become everyday, but I don’t take them for granted; I still feel really, very fortunate. I wish that these things were easily available to everyone.

Ivan Maxwell Jones Story

I have lived in Malvern for 16 years now, and I’ve been painting the Malverns for the last ten years or so, but I’ve been an artist for a lot longer, and I’ve been interested in art all my life. I grew up in Norwich, which is a wonderful city, but there’s not many hills! Although I grew up in Norfolk, we would holiday each year in mid-Wales. So we would traverse the country and come to the mountains and the lush greenery and coast of Wales, where my mum lives now. So that was really important for me, right from a very young age, that sense of travelling through the landscape and that connection with nature. My granddad was a painter too, and he painted the woodlands of Epping Forest and Highams Park lake in East London, as well as other weird and wonderful scenes that captured my imagination as a child.

I moved here from Bristol in my early thirties, and again, I love Bristol, and I miss the friends and the more progressive politics there, but there came a time in our lives, (My wife and I had a one-year-old), when we wanted out of the city. We wanted clean air and to see green things growing rather than a view of the back of Tesco’s. I remember coming here for my job interview to be a secondary school Art teacher, and seeing the Malverns rise up out of the landscape for the first time, and just thinking to myself, “wow, I could live here”. Having come from my teacher training in some quite rough, comprehensive schools in inner-city Bristol, it was a real breath of fresh air. And that sense of wonder, that this beautiful landscape could actually be home, has stayed with me, and my whole family. It’s not something that I get used to or tired of. It’s still magical and still fills me up with a lot of joy to be here.

However, it took me quite a while to really get to know the Malverns well. In my early days, it was all-consuming having a young family and teaching, so it took time to really feel connected to the place that I live. I think the Malvern Hills have the right balance of being really quite wild in places, but also really accessible for everyone. From where I live, I can get in the car and be up there in five minutes, or get on my bike and in half an hour I’m up in the hills, and what that gives me is a wonderful perspective on the surrounding landscape, but also on my life, to be able to be above it all. And when you’re up there, you can see a lot of green around you, and the beautiful blue hills in the distance, and just be surrounded by nature. It’s my happy place, where I come and just feel excited to be alive. I’m so grateful to be able to bring up my kids in this environment, and for them to regularly be up here, and walking with us on the hills, and having their own relationship with nature.

I was initially an abstract painter, before painting landscapes, but there’s something about the Malverns and being out in nature that’s very hard to resist. I love to walk on the Malverns in all seasons, in all weathers, all times of day. I’m passionate about capturing in my paintings something of that natural wonder that I experience in the everyday.
So I’m still an abstract painter, in that I still regularly paint and sell abstract works, and in a way they’re still landscapes of a sort, but they’re my interior landscapes. My journeys of the imagination. So I love allowing myself to express pure colour, texture, and tone. But even with these abstract paintings, I see motifs of the hills and nature emerging subconsciously into these works. I guess it’s just part of me now.
Although I’m best known for my more realistic, though heightened, paintings of the local landscape, I’m also interested in exploring more abstract ways of expressing my experience of being in the Malvern Hills. Most of my more figurative pieces are very much about conveying a sense of place. It might be about capturing that particular moment where the light comes through the clouds, and hits the edge of the hills, or the evening sun lighting up the red sorrel in June. As well as trying to capture the drama, and that visual excitement that I feel in seeing the world around me, it’s also about conveying a sense of connectedness to a very ancient and sacred place that’s been somewhere that people have lived and visited and shared with other animals for a long time.

Painting for me is always an interesting journey of discovery, and every painting is different. There’s never a set approach to it, so I’m always discovering new things. Usually I feel like I’m learning afresh every time I start. Sometimes I paint en plein air, and that gives a sense of immediacy. And certainly working with acrylics, as I mainly do now, there’s not a lot of time to reflect, because the paint dries so quickly, especially outdoors, and especially when it’s windy in the summer.

So working quickly and with the changing light and battling the elements can be quite exhilarating and also quite challenging. Most of the time I will take photographs while I’m out and sketch and soak up the atmosphere. And when I go back home, I’m looking over the photographs and sketches and I’m composing within my home studio. And that process takes a lot longer. I’m building up layers of paint. I’m spending time with the painting and looking and responding, bringing out subtleties and a mood that I maybe miss in that immediacy of the moment. So that’s a far more reflective process than the really immediate en plein air painting. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages.

Painting for me is quite an engaged and physical process: I’m throwing paint on, scratching into it and building up layers. I’m always pleased, and slightly surprised, when a fully formed painting eventually emerges from a series of experimentations and mistakes. Paintings will often go through an ugly phase. And everyone who paints kind of knows that, that there’s a phase where it feels like a disaster and you’re thinking it just looks horrible. But the thing about being more experienced is that you know and accept that “it’s just the ugly phase”, and you push on through and come out the other side. Sometimes you’ve lost some of the spontaneity of the initial work, but you know, you capture something else through working at it. It’s always an interesting journey, and I love it!

As well as being a painter, I’m a teacher. After teaching in a Worcestershire secondary school for 10 years, I taught painting classes at the Malvern School of Art before WCG closed it down in 2020. I still teach, mainly adults now, and I run regular painting classes in West Malvern. That’s really important part of what I do, that connection to my community and helping to facilitate other people’s creativity. I like to have that balance. When I was a full-time teacher, I didn’t have that balance. So for me that connection with others through enabling them to connect with their own creative journey is as important as connecting with the collectors and people who engage with my paintings. They see something that they love and that they feel really captures a place that is special to them. Or there’s something about the colours or the texture that really speaks to them. It’s sometimes quite hard to say goodbye to a painting that I’ve put my heart and soul into and really love. And it’s hard to put a price on something like that. But obviously, as a professional artist, I have to do just that!

Sometimes I hear back from people who have bought my work and they let me know how much pleasure it brings to them having a piece of original art on their wall and how much it speaks to them. What I try to convey through my work is a sense of an emotional connection to the landscape. It’s an amazing thing to be able to do that for people, and so while it can be hard to part with my paintings, I’m overjoyed when I do make a sale, especially to someone where there’s a real personal connection. It’s a privilege to be able to do a job where I’m able to be creative and facilitate other people’s creativity, and I’m able to support my family through that process. I’m also part of an artists co-operative that own Take 4 Gallery in Ledbury, a collectively run gallery where 24 local artists support each other. Getting to know them and Ledbury has been a real pleasure, and is helping to expand my sense of connection to the wider surrounding area as well.

One of the best things about living here is seeing my children grow up in an environment where there’s easy access to such beautiful nature. Going on long family walks together on the Hills have been some of the happiest moments of my life. It’s not just, the dramatic hills however, inspiring though they are, but just as important on a smaller scale are the commons. We have seen deer, badgers, wild orchids, all sorts of birds and amazing flora and fauna on our local common, and all that just a few minutes from where we live. Fresh air, great walking and clean spring water; these things have become everyday, but I don’t take them for granted; I still feel really, very fortunate. I wish that these things were easily available to everyone.