Bryan Jones – Featured Artist

Bryan Jones - Untitled 4, Oil on Linen over Wood, 22x20 in., 2009

Bryan Jones is a painter based in New Haven, Connecticut. Working primarily in oil and employing the techniques of the Old Masters, Jones makes paintings that exist in the no man’s land between represent- ation and abstraction. This is the complex territory of “both/and” as opposed to “either/or.”

By pouring molten beeswax into cold water Jones creates the figures that are the ostensible subject matter of his paintings. Jones lights and stages the wax forms, as one would the subject of a portrait or still life. Through the act of painting, however, the wax subject is transcended.

Bryan Jones - Untitled 2, Oil on Linen over Wood, 24x30 in., 2008

Bryan Jones - Eruption, Ink on Paper, 13x17 in., 2007

The paintings seem to depict bodily functions at the micro level, or perhaps natural actions of the Earth on the macro level. The distinction is ambiguous, and beside the point, though the pulse and flow of organic processes are clearly in evidence. This movement and undulation, at once beautiful and grotesque, is frozen for the viewer’s examination.

Jones’ work celebrates the ability of painting to create a world unto itself. That painted world may have a referent in the physical world, as in the paintings of Rembrandt Van Rijn, with whose work Jones’ frequently shares technical and formal properties, or the painted world may have a metaphysical, abstract referent. Such is the case in the mature work of Jackson Pollock, of which Jones’ decentralized compositions are also reminiscent.

Bryan Jones - Portrait, Oil on Linen over Wood, 28x24 in., 2009

Bryan Jones - Untitled 3, Oil on Linen over Wood, 32x28 in., 2008

With a foot in both abstraction and representation, Bryan Jones’ paintings serve to remind the viewer that just as all physical reality is swirling, non-local energy organized by a process of one’s individual, selective perception, a painted world is, merely and magnificently, pigment suspended in a viscous vehicle applied to a support. All painting is abstraction, and/or all painting is representation.

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