Stuart Jones’s painting ‘Melt’ has been shortlisted for the 2022 Beep Painting Biennial, including the Beep Painting Prize. The exhibition runs from 29th July to 10th September 2022 at Elysium Gallery, 210 High Street, Swansea, SA1 1PE.

Stuart’s work is informed by the urban and rural landscape and ideas of utopia, dystopia and the sublime and has in the past been shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2020 and awarded the Contemporary Arts Trust Prize in 2019. Stuart writes, “The environment and how we experience the landscape interests me and informs my practice. My work explores the human relationship with the landscape and how this is in flux. As we become increasingly disconnected from our environment due to technological advancement, we are in conflict with the natural world due to the way we live. Ideas of utopia, dystopia, heterotopia and the sublime are consistent themes within my practice. The Anthropocene and the climate crisis and current social and political issues feed my thinking”. Stuart’s process varies and has evolved over time but his artwork generally starts with drawings, images, and collages that I have manipulated and experimented with: this then forms the starting point for the painting.  The human figure is missing from my paintings, enabling the viewer to become the missing human presence within the work, the spaces becoming portals that the viewer has to negotiate into an alternative world, space or time. 

Launched in 2012, BEEP (Biennial exhibition of painting) is a contemporary international painting prize based in Swansea, Wales. BEEP supports imaginative and vibrant practice in contemporary painting.

BEEP returns in the summer of 2022 where the main Beep Painting Prize exhibition – ‘Nothing has changed, Everything has changed’ will take place at Elysium gallery in Swansea City centre at 210 High Street with other painting exhibitions and activities dotted around Swansea and Cardiff.

The main prize is £1000 and a solo exhibition with elysium gallery in 2024. There is a Welsh Prize chosen by the Friends of the Glynn Vivian and the Peoples Prize voted for by the public.