Paul Flynn

‘Emerge - Alan Jones’
ArtistProfile, Spring 2007, The First Issue, pages 24-26.

---

ALAN JONES

Story by Paul Flynn Photography by Euphoria

I first came across Alan Jones in an Art Almanac preview for an exhibition at Legge Gallery called The Human Show. The painting reproduced, simply Painting 45, was a naked man with a hulky, canary yellow body and a shrunken, striped head, a disconcerting hybrid of Boris Karloff and Big Bird.

Jones’ work has a strange supernatural bent, like a shifting cast of mythological extras.  Mostly he paints solitary figures, often as dismembered talismans – witness the curious floating heads above the Hawkesbury landscape in Painting 32, or Painting 54’s severed blue foot. In Painting 55, the strange two-headed Golum is propped up in a cloud – the awkward figure emerges from the canvas as a creature from another world. Jones doesn’t so much illustrate as incarnate his forms with thick impasto and bold brushstrokes. This repetitive series of full body Paintings is a fantastically obsessive project of creation and discovery – figures splitting, re-assembling and endlessly propagating.

In his recent exhibition Paintings from Windsor, we see images of family and friends. The portraits are not indifferent to the objective properties of their subjects, but he clearly has symbolic ambitions with their execution. His father’s face is mask-like with stripes of flame pink, a pattern he repeats in a self-portrait in black – we can recognise a disciplining paternal face-off in Jones’ narrative shorthand, showing simply family relationships with colour and form.

Jones himself has none of the sharp edges that characterise some of his peers. He’s coy and modest about his work practices.

“I mean, sometimes you go into your studio, your mind is a thousand miles away, you’ve got an hour and half in there before you’ve got to catch the train, you have got no idea what your going to work on… and you produce your best work,” he says. “I do get kind of anxious about whether I’m going to get ideas out quick enough before they dissolve in the back of my head somewhere.”

“It can go 12 months very quickly and during that period you might only talk to half a dozen people about what you actually do.”

 I understand you left Australia straight out of art school and went travelling.

I did a lot of travelling. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I was just interested in getting out there, absorbing and responding to my environment, what I was seeing, people I was meeting places I was going. I made so many drawings that I ended up coming back to Australia with about 500 small works on paper. I thought it would be good to work from those, almost collage those images into the paintings, just to get them onto the surface of the canvas.

 I also wrote a lot – short stories some poems. I’m a terrible writer by the way, but I would wake up and write whatever was in my head. I filled up a whole book and realised it was probably material for about three different shows, the very first seeds just coming from random thoughts.

In 2004, you won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship [judged by artist Kevin Connor, Art Gallery of New South Whales Director, Edmund Capon, and Barry Pearce, the gallery’s Curator of Australian Art, with a prize of $25,000 and a three-month stint at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris]. What inspired you?

The portfolio I entered into the Whiteley Scholarship was made up of figures and birds. The figures came from viewing Bonnard drawings and the birds were from both Titian and Rembrandt paintings I’d been studying, so the subject matter was very far away from me. Recently, I’ve wanted to bring the subject matter back closer to me and make work about Windsor where I’m living at the moment …self portraits, make work about family.

Is source material important to you or do you tend to work more from memory?

That’s a tough one to answer. I go through phases I suppose. I mean, I could easily go for six months and not look at anyone else’s work apart from when a friend invites me to their show. I’ll go along for support and I’ll definitely check out what they’re up to but I won’t have my nose in books or be surfing the internet. More likely, I’m just in the zone of looking at my own work and responding to my new works from my old works, maybe going through drawings from 10 years ago, old paintings, just working from my own stuff. Other time, I might go to a show and really let it affect me and you do take that back into the studio.

So you prefer to lock yourself away when you work?

Working in the studio is such a solo activity and when you’re making a body of work for an exhibition it’s a long intense process. It can go 12 months very quickly and during that period you might only talk to half a dozen people about what you actually do and all your hours you spend painting you’re by yourself. Football was a great outlet. It really balanced my work but my knee’s not as strong as it used to be.

---