Fay Jones

Her paintings are tableaus, and her tableaus are stones, yet they are also baited traps, poised to spring. One moves around them with care as well as pleasure. -- Regina HackettThis delightful book, with insightful essays by Regina Hackett and Sondra Shulman, provides a fresh perspective and understanding of Fay Jones art. The paintings and mixed-media collages included here survey four main periods in the artist's career. From the early 1970s to 1977, Jones works were primarily diaristic. The artist created figural compositions in outdoor settings that explored her reflections on social conventions and interpersonal relationships. From 1977 to 1980, Jones became a socially conscious observer, moving beyond the personal views of a diarist. Her paintings grew in scale, while background landscapes and atmospheric perspective were eliminated and figures became more prominent.During the 1980s, Jones developed contrived fictions of painted stage sets in which all real space disappears and the artist incorporates theatrical devices. Diverse and conflicting figures lay one upon the other, overlapping like cutouts or paper dolls. Rendered in a geometric framework, they gain a sense of monumentality and take on the rhetoric of the stage. In the 1990s, Jones has incorporated a lighter, brighter palette and bolder shapes; she has found elegance in the simplification of forms and a directness that is poised and assured. In her paintings, Fay Jones has chronicled a lifetime of impressions, observations, and reflections, all peppered with brilliant imagination and wry humor.