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“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.”
- Hunter S. Thompson
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If you want to freak out painter Scott Jones, here is what you need to do. Just wait for Scott in front of one of his canvases at an opening — sipping chardonnay or craft beer or whatever — and when heads your way just ask him: “Can you tell me more about this piece of yours?” You may find yourself waiting through an inordinately long pause and a noticeable bit of fidgeting with the label on his beer. What he’s doing is trying to guess what it is you want to hear. Dedicated to painting towards the perimeter of what he knows, Jones is a seeker who likes to push himself — and his work — towards enigma and self-conscious weirdness.
If he had the wherewithal in that social moment to be forthright, the actual answer may sound a bit hermetic. Jones works in the confidence — perhaps, at times, misplaced — that the language of his painting is sufficient to carry meaning without further explanation. Verbal description can limit the experience of art, he believes, by boxing in meaning. Leaving blanks for the viewer to fill in is an essential aspect of any art in Jones’s mind. In that way, he tends to assign a formidable amount of ambiguity within the content of the work. The question then becomes this: does the craftsmanship of the painting make the mental homework worthwhile? “It’s my hope,” Jones offers, “that I leave enough breadcrumbs on my way down the rabbit hole to set the expectations of the viewer.”
Embracing the possibilities of distortion, exaggeration and transformation, Jones wields his paintbrush as a weapon to sweep away assumptions and dust off the esoteric. He likes what he calls “do or die brushstrokes.” As disconcerting as the results may look — at first — Jones sees himself as part of the long-established tradition of using art as a form of search. Oh, and it’s personal…very personal.
Countless museum visits have taught him to find openings in the works of the “masters” — for example Velasquez, Goya, de Kooning and Bacon — and then dive right into them as a way of doubling down on his observations: observations which, judging by the proximity of his nose to the canvas, become obsessions. “I ask myself,” he says, “if security hasn’t yelled at me to stand back at least twice, have I really been at that museum?”’
Themes, ideas and stylistic quirks that other onlookers might miss are his bread and butter (and his opium). At heart, Jones is a moralist with strong spiritual yearnings that fuel his stylistic rebellions. Growing up in a Fundamentalist Baptist household taught Jones that human beings are attracted to myths and icons and that is what opened the door (ironically) to the rich strangeness he has detected in earlier art, especially of the religious variety. “I consider myself, as an adult, to be an existential atheist,” Jones philosophizes. If you find yourself not knowing exactly what that means, bear in mind that Jones is fine with that.
One recent Jones painting-in-progress, provisionally titled “A History of Support,” features a kind of backwards waterfall that was inspired by the theatrical red curtain that hangs across the top of Caravaggio’s “Death of the Virgin.” A strange contrivance — a blue rowboat bearing a teetering Doric column, supported by three tilting piers — seems to be struggling to find its way up this spiritual conveyor belt. Just as asking the artist “What is going on here?” would lead to… well…. gibberish…trying to assign any firm meaning to this canvas would be a frustrating experience. A better way to explore this work is to just enjoy its various suggestions and allusions. This writer gets transcendence, self-deception, Disney’s “Fantasia” and Western civilization is in for one Hell of a ride. What do you get?
Jones is an empath — not unlike the Viennese Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka — whose ability to let feelings take him towards connection with his subjects is a definite strength. One recent painting, which started out as a self-portrait, quickly morphed into a wavy-gravy portrait of the artist’s next-door neighbor: a veteran of the Iraq war. After listening to the young man talk about the horrors he has witnessed, Scott painted him as a haunted, fantastic figure. Although the subject of the painting claims that he was “hired to do a job and did it,” Jones painted him in a way that goes beyond the stated facts — and literal appearances — into a spiritual realm. Finding the rivers of feeling under life’s experiences is, after all, one of art’s ongoing tasks.
Boats and water appear in a number of Scott Jones paintings, often suggesting unconscious realms. A solitary grey-blue figure with folded arms appears in a rowboat beneath a textured reddish orb in one recent work. Although it is tempting to assign the painting some kind of narrative, it’s clear that a big part of what it offers is abstract: just the way the red is applied is what will likely hold a viewer’s attention. “Painting is always about surface,” Jones observes, and his attention to the way that paint can spread, create texture or be absorbed is a big part of what draws him in as an image progresses. As he explains it:
I don’t see a division between abstraction and realism. All painting, to my mind, is abstract. The realism we see is a construction in our minds. All paintings are, without exception, colored mud on a surface. The emotional response that mud, once dry, might elicit is obviously a subjective experience. When is a maroon rectangle just a piece of fabric and when is it elevated to the height of a Rothko masterpiece? When is a texture just a texture? All the time and never.
Of course, there is a chance that the lunar blue textures at the top of the painting seen above have nothing to do with emotional states: sometimes a texture is just a texture, right? Then again, the falling, flaming lotus (if that’s what it is) and the conversation between two humanoid presences (possibly) evokes some kind of state of awe or discovery. Scott has a feeling for the cosmic and it often feels like some of the giddy optimism of the Age of Aquarius is still coursing through his veins.
To be open, to feel things, to invent things and to avoid letting the process of creation ever settle into habit: there are the preoccupations of Scott Jones. “Innovation. Invention. Singularity. That’s what makes art great,” as he recently explained to a friend on Facebook. Being clear about what art needs to be has helped him be remarkably free about the way it needs to look.
