Patrick Jones : painter of large scale, abstract works of powerful form and in lustrous colour
Approaching the blank canvas, sometimes as it’s on the floor, circling it, looking to picture ideas, Patrick Jones is no slave to external systems that for some artists impose themselves on their art. Rather he looks afresh for ideas - ideas that are pure color and form on the surface with no external relationship. For him it is a visual language from which arise pictorial events to be savored. Though intuitive and of the moment, his painterly decisions are informed by decades of experience. But these are choices open to all, as Jones investigates his own sensitivity for what any person might equally experience. And so we viewers must play along with the artist as he pushes and pulls colors into forms on the canvas everything open to change as he intensely studies the possibilities. Fixate on the whole and see the large-scale relationships as they form patterns and visual spaces or scan the details and feel the nuances of the picture. This is how the meaning of such work affects us: not through the precision of semantic reference, but through the ambiguity of pragmatic effect.
Sanford Wurmfeld
Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Professor of Fine Art
Hunter College, City University of New York
New catalysts inform the visual language of Patrick Jones's new paintings of
Trained in the modernist genre, with considerable international success in the 70’s and 80’s in the UK and the USA, Patrick Jones, like many artists of his generation, has struggled through the post-modern era.
As a result, during this period, Jones decided to look beyond his earlier mentors: Pollock, Gottlieb, Newman and early Stella from the USA; and Irvin, Walker, Heron and Beattie from the UK, to African and Oceanic Art and early European modernists such as Braque and Gris. To him “influence is not to be feared, but embraced for how else are we to learn?” These new catalysts liberated Patrick’s palette and use of colour to break from the confines of form, to enable him to discover his own symbolism and surface organisation.
The organisation in these ‘abstract’ paintings often involves the resolving of diametric opposites and like many of his contemporaries he finds inspiration in subjects such as modern musical forms like free-form jazz. These discoveries now enable Jones to leap back and forth in time, grabbing whatever image, symbol or colour he feels is necessary for “the resolution of a visual language.” Although his practice may not be current or ‘fashionable’, he has an absolute conviction in the social and cultural function of the visual arts and an irrevocable belief and passion in painting as the high altar for the arts.