British artist Lucy Jones has been described by art critic Jackie Wullschlager as "the most exciting English colorist of her generation'' With a clear and often brutally frank vision, her paintings connect a journey through exterior landscapes and interior worlds.   Awkward Beauty is the first publication to draw together both her portraits and landscape paintings produced over the past 25 years, tracing the evolution of a distinctively vibrant painterly language, which she has used to describe the world, herself and, most recently, other people. Illustrated with more than 100 color plates, the book demonstrates Jones's broad emotional range, from densely chromatic and vigorously wrought vistas painted in the British countryside, to her raw and powerfully expressive presentations of the figure, addressing the vulnerabilities and the strengths of Jones's own disabilities, and society's way of viewing difference in others.