From today at Leicester’s Attenborough Arts Centre is a spectacular display of twenty-five years of paintings by Lucy Jones. Landscapes and self-portraits have been at the centre of Jones’s practice since the 1980s, but recently she’s turned her gaze on others. Among the portraits she has painted in the last four years is this one of Grayson Perry, cheekily titled The Seeing Orator. Perry is a patron of the Attenborough Arts Centre, which commissioned the work. Jones didn’t know Perry before she painted him, but she’s captured him as few people are used to seeing him in public: wistful, and a little unsure of himself. “Beauty is very much about familiarity,” Perry once said. At Jones’s exhibition, there are plenty of ruminations on beauty and its relationship with the gaze, power and visibility.
