David Hansen

'Faces in the frame'
The Age, 4 April 2007, page 15.

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ALAN Jones works in three quite distinct modes. In the first, severed heads described in black and white convict-pyjama-muscle stripes float above soft wet-wash river landscapes. Elsewhere, these grimacing ecorches are attached in pairs to rough-impasted Baselitz-Booth bodies, tarred and feathered psycho-monsters framed in smeary mandorla clouds over harlequin floors. Simpler and smaller in conception but in some ways richer is a series of large portrait faces, where Jones' occasionally uncertain line is covered by his painterly fluency, by the confident contrast-play between tone, colour and texture, glaze and crust, brush and knife.

Alan Jones, Paintings from Windsor, James Makin Gallery,
716 High Street, Armadale, www.jamesmakingallery.com.au, closes tomorrow

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