PRESS

Overview

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"Jon Field has re-invented history painting so that it is relevant for our time. Field is an artist, he is an historian; and his work questions the role of the artist and the historian simultaneously." (Steve Aishmann, Art Relish, 2021)

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The Painted Closet

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In the early seventeenth century, Lady Anne Bacon Drury of Suffolk, England, created a series of small allegorical pictures. For the past twelve months I have been re- working Lady Anne's project, recycling the history of Western art to my own ends.

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See: https://www.floromancy.org/submit/2020/8/2/the-painted-closet-of-jonathan-david-field

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Mottoes

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Lady Anne’s paintings include a series of pithy life mottoes. A number of these - printed onto wooden panels - were recently displayed in public spaces in England, France and the United States. They are also included in the last edition of drainmag.com, journal of contemporary art and culture.

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See: http://drainmag.com/mottoes/

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The Desiring Machine

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Dada artist Kurt Schwitters' ‘Desiring Machine’ was a continually changing, immersive environment. Its’ only principle was one of continuous fluid production, a dynamic process of adding and subtracting, of becoming.

Adopting this model, Field oversaw the construction of a Desiring Machine in Savannah, USA in March 2022.

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See: https://eu.savannahnow.com/story/entertainment/2022/02/21/jon-field-the-desiring-machine-sulfur-studios-on-view-residency-savannah-ga/6845697001/

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Maxwell’s Demon

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Made of pins that puncture sheets of black velvet, these pictures bring to mind pixilation, radioactivity, molecular randomness, stars. These pictures are history paintings in the tradition of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa.

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See: http://artpulsemagazine.com/silver-a-conversation-with-jon-field