Page 51 - Studio International - July/August 1967

Evening incandescence
1967
canvas and shelf
36 x 36 in. and shelf

Both Falling Woman (1964), a shaped canvas deriving a painter's ideas extended into space.
from a painting of a parachuting couple done the With Curious Woman (1964-5) he applied projecting
previous year, and Green Girl are early evidences of the elements—plastic falsies— to a female (mostly) figure, and
shift towards sharply-defined, harder-edged forms and essayed in relief in Custom Maid, a plexiglass and wood
highlighted, fully-modelled limbs. The austere form of structure which includes a pair of ladies' high-heeled
Evening Incandescence is quite clearly directly related to shoes. But the direct impulse for the current paintings
Spear (1965) and Glimpsed Woman (1964), while the snake came again from print-making, from two sets of litho-
and lips motif of Pathway grew out of a lithograph and a graphs executed last summer in Los Angeles, both of
silk-screen of 1965. Female legs and shoes also began to which were concerned, to a degree, with destroying the
assume greater significance in Jones' art in 1965, from two idea of the 'fine print' by man-handling the paper. The
directions : the lithograph Janet is Wearing, and the import- subject of the first folio returned to the buses theme, the
ant Male and Female diptych, which are the first examples lower corners of the sheet torn away to leave only the
of feet walking on the edge and plane of the canvas. wheels, but the second group deals with legs on tiled
The ledges and stairs which invite the spectator into the floors—and the purchaser is instructed to fold up the lower
other reality of the representations are the latest of part to form a ledge.
Jones' experiments with pictorial space and the object This small act of physical participation by the viewer is
quality of the paintings. Since the shaped canvases of the itself symbolic of the artist's desire for a directly felt
buses, aeroplanes, and parachutists, when he was one of emotional communication. His virtuoso handling of
the pioneers of the lateral extension of the painting colour and mastery of 'belle peinture' and formal con-
surface, Jones has been concerned with the illusory and siderations are the means to an expression of one man's
actual protrusion of pictorial space. To Curious Man spiritual experience. In sum, the eroticism of Allen
(1964), an oil on panel, he attached a corrugated wooden Jones' paintings is not sly or leering. It is a confident
moulding as the necktie; this was the germ of the un- expression of creativity in terms of male and female,
dulating wooden Man constructions of later that year. symbolic and conceptual aspects of the self—among other
Though completely three-dimensional, they are not things. Jones' hallucinatory language is a private myth-
sculpture. Rather they should be considered as four ology, a store of latent, metaphoric, universal knowledge,
planes, joined and painted, and separated from the wall: and richer than rational thought.
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