Chris Hoy BBC Sports personality of the year
14th December 2008‘CH2050’ is the latest painting by artist Lee Jones, whose striking image of Cheryl Cole as the ‘Angel of the North’ has recently achieved widespread press coverage and captured the public imagination.
‘CH2050’ is part of the ‘Beyond Human’ series, portraying elite athletes as superhuman beings. This unique painting of newly crowned BBC Sports Personality of the year Chris Hoy MBE - Olympic gold cycling medallist, World Champion and Commonwealth champion - depicts the Scottish hero with bulging gold biceps and legs, in a reference to his astonishing coup of 3 gold medals in Beijing this year.
According to BBC News ‘Hoy’s achievements at the Beijing Olympics were simply superhuman’, and Lee Jones’s painting of Hoy as ‘Beyond Human’ is a fitting artistic interpretation of this exceptional athlete. I was honoured when the artist wanted to include me in his ‘Beyond Human’ series, and I’m extremely pleased and flattered with the finished painting.
Chris Hoy For each painting in the series Jones perceives the athlete as a machine so perfectly engineered they become ‘Beyond Human’. The ‘Beyond Human’ series is endorsed with the creative input of each Sportsperson, and will be exhibited in a 2050 Sports exhibition at The Arts Club in London’s Mayfair along with ‘Angel’ in February 2009.
Other elite athletes featured in the ‘Beyond Human’ series include Olympic cycling gold medallist and World Champion Victoria Pendleton; Commonwealth, World & Olympic champion sprinter Christine Ohuruogu; Jamaican sprinter and Olympic medallist Usain Bolt; one of the originators of Freerunning, Daniel Ilabaca, and World champion boxer Ricky Hattton.
The Ricky Hatton painting has been featured on Sky Sports News, Granada TV and in The Times. Limited edition prints of the Chris Hoy painting, signed by Chris Hoy and Lee Jones, are available on the website, with a percentage of all sales going to Hoy’s nominated charity.
Each limited edition print is signed by the Sport star and the artist and therefore a collectable investment, as well as a great piece of art to hang on the wall. Lee Jones is an award-winning Liverpool based artist who was based for a period in a Hollywood studio, where his creative output included designing jewellery for clients such as Madonna and James Woods.
Collectors of Jones’s work include Radiohead and My Chemical Romance. Jones is also a talented graffiti artist whose commissions include the redesign and rebranding of the ‘Renegade Ducati’ Superbike team, a Heavy Metal magazine cover, and set design for rock stars Oasis.
Jones seeks to capture the beauty and power of the human form in his paintings, and his talent for figurative painting was discovered at the age of 8 when he won a national painting competition. Jones’s childhood influences of comic strips, Manga and Pop Art are still evident in his paintings, whilst more recent influences Lucian Freud, Rosenquist and Paula Rego have infiltrated his work as it becomes more figurative.