Aurora
Paintings by Nick Jones
This autumn, Nature in Art presents two galleries of paintings by Nick Jones, made between 2015 and 2020 and drawn from his long fascination with landscape, light and the far north. The museum previously exhibited Jones’s Arctic paintings in 2023, and now returns to his work with a further telling of the story — both the aurora that first drew him north, and the optical phenomena that followed.
The first gallery brings together Jones’s aurora paintings, made after a series of trips to Finnish Lapland from 2014 in search of the Northern Lights. Those who have witnessed the aurora have long reached for the language of wonder to describe it; the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen called it “colour etherealized,” writing that nothing more beautiful could exist than the Arctic night. It was in that same spirit of awe and wonder that Jones set out to paint what he saw. The results are quiet, luminous works that seek to evoke the mesmerising experience of standing beneath the aurora.
The second gallery turns to other optical phenomena of Arctic skies: halos, coronas, parhelia, fog-bows and rainbows (the last increasingly seen as rain becomes more common in a warming Arctic) formed as sunlight passes through the ice crystals, water droplets and mist that fill the polar air. Many of these paintings were made before Jones had seen such phenomena in the Arctic for himself, and developed in the studio out of a growing curiosity about the far north, and in preparation for his 2018 residency in Greenland and Baffin Island.
Across both galleries, Jones’s work traces not just what these phenomena look like but evokes something of the wonder and mystery that those lucky enough to have seen them have long described.
Nick Jones will also give a talk on 24th November, sharing more of the story behind both bodies of work. Book a ticket here