Layers: The Art of Erik Jones
With their color palettes like rare, tropical birds, Erik Jones’ paintings present beauty as it might exist in a vacuum. Or at least that’s the illusion. While no artwork truly exists outside of a social context (art is, after all, created by a person who belongs to a certain pocket of society) Jones minimizes the real-world and cultural references in his paintings, presenting an amalgamation of aesthetic currents bound by a fashion-lover’s lust for ornamentation and a designer’s keen eye for composition. An aesthetician instead of an ideologue, Jones marries realist and abstract elements in works free of conceptual pretensions. Instead of cultivating symbols and hidden meanings, Jones focuses on eliciting a visceral reaction from his viewers—a gasp, a widened eye, even a whetted palette.
Slender, often nude, female figures populate Jones’ worlds of color-saturated haze. Simplified blotches of flamingo pinks, mustard yellows and bronzy oranges surround his characters like crowns or extravagant garments. Under the guise of free-spirited, spontaneous brushstrokes, these marks echo the free-flowing movements of Abstract Expressionism despite their carefully planned, geometric layout. The flat, expressive marks culminate into rigid shapes—hexagonal outlines and symmetrical arrangements that frame voluminous, bare body parts that gleam with a glossy sheen like the airbrushed skin of a model in a fashion magazine.
Erik Jones was born and raised in the small beach community of St. Petersburg, Florida, splitting his time between his mother and father’s separate homes as a child. “My reality as a child was sunshine, sand, retirees, and flamingo art. Not extremely inspiring but comfortable and down to earth,” he commented. Surrounded by that distinctly Floridian mix of kitsch,
Jones looked to his musician father and oil painter neighbor for his early creative inspiration. “[My neighbor’s works] were landscape paintings but like nothing I had ever seen, full of texture and color—a precursor to my own work, I’m sure,” said Jones, reminiscing.
Jones graduated in 2007 from the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, an art school named after John Ringling of the famous Ringling Brothers Circus. An eponymous art museum filled with Ringling’s extravagant European art collection and the Ringling mansion are located in the same town. Their garish recreations of colorful Venetian glass and illustrious Italian fountains glimmer against the sunny coast of the Gulf of Mexico, with its mobile homes, wading tourists in flip-flops, bubblegum-colored scoops of ice cream and alligator-shaped magnets in every knick-knack store. Perhaps a vestige of Jones’ past, an over-the-top sense of artificial luxury pervades his personal work. While the only representational feature of his paintings is the female form, save for a few pieces where male bodies and human skulls are involved, he translates his love for opulence through myriad vivid colors.
“I’ve always been attracted to bright, even garish, color palettes. I believe this stems from my ridiculous attraction to cartoons and my deep love affair with ‘60s illustration, which is where most of my earlier work draws from. Maybe not so much style, but definitely mood and color,” Jones contemplated.
Jones approaches abstraction like a designer, which is no coincidence, as the artist also dabbles in apparel and commercial illustration. He sees the distinction between his fine art and commercial work as only what is intended to be hung on a wall and what will grace a book jacket or a t-shirt. His early interest in art led him to a commercial illustration career that gave rise to a newfound devotion to his personal work. Lately, Jones has stripped down his commercial projects to include only those that fall in line with his personal aesthetic. “It’s been a bit of a stressful process (financially). However, an absolute necessity (creatively),” Jones remarked.
Though a skilled realist painter, Jones uses figuration sparingly in his work. The abstract elements in his paintings are not merely crafted to better present the sensual, nude female bodies Jones so deftly renders. Instead, the flat abstract marks and voluminous figures coexist on an equal plane, each part complementing the other to create a sense of harmonious wholeness.
I’ve always been attracted to bright, even garish color palettes. I believe this stems from my ridiculous attraction to cartoons…”
“I like my work to look decorative and elegant. I find the softness of the female form incorporates these qualities and [is] more complementary to my work,” he said. “The newest work uses color and shapes, rather gratuitously, as a framing device—a way to move the eye around and to engage the viewer. Like an insect drawn to light, we are drawn to intricacy. Not saying that simplistic works don’t draw us in. However, when something is full of ‘information,’ we are pulled in to examine and define what it is we are looking at. Color helps define the hundreds of shapes I use in a painting and the more color I use, the easier it is to define.”
Jones’ equal treatment of the abstract and the figurative in his work stems from his two of his greatest loves: high fashion and contemporary non-representational painting. Though commonly thought to be unrelated (consumer-oriented fashion design and lofty, conceptual abstract art seem far apart on the traditional low brow-high brow art spectrum), Jones sees a compatibility in these forms of expression despite their superficial differences.
“A few years back I fell in love with contemporary nonrepresentational painting and thought, ‘I wish they would throw a figure in there, I’d love it even more.’ So I did,” Jones traced the genesis of his aesthetic direction. “Although, it’s funny, I feel like I’m starting to lose the need to have a figure in the painting. I’m wanting to go more and more abstract with it. Look for that in years to come, I’m sure.”
The figure’s place in abstract art clicked into place when Jones examined the intricate designs in runway fashion. Lavish and baroque, unwearable yet captivating, the haute couture collections of the top fashion houses echo the compositional qualities he found appealing in abstract art. Exquisite arrangements of color and texture are adapted to frame the contours of the human figure; the garments elevate the body to become something otherworldly and extraordinary.
“The designer whose work inspired me to look at fashion in a different way is the late Alexander McQueen. Each one of his conceptual pieces is an elegant sculpture. I have a few of his books, but, to be honest, you have to see his collections in motion. Watching the models interact with the pieces is extremely captivating. The models aren’t secondary: they become a part of the art. I want that balance in my work. I don’t want you to see a portrait of someone or just be consumed with abstract clutter, but rather see a harmonious motionless dance of shapes decorating the figure. Where both elements—representational and non-representational—become one.”
The union of abstraction and figuration in Jones’ work is an extensive process carried out through a variety of media. He loathes keeping a sketchbook—something he jokingly refers to as a “glorified, bound to-do list”—and draws on loose-leaf paper, playing with ideas for elaborate headdresses and floral arrangements. A model is selected and a photo shoot is arranged. Jones spends hours perusing the photos, selecting individual positions of the hands, neck, torso and face and then “Frankensteining” these features on Photoshop to create the basis for his figures.
“I’m extremely methodical when it comes to most of my paintings. Especially in the beginning stages. I have come up with a loose formula I like to start with when I’m in the early stages of creating a new piece: 30 percent structure, 70 percent chaos. This formula sufficiently fulfills my need to ‘illustrate’ representational objects,” Jones said when asked about his preliminary process. “Take a look at one of the pieces that has shapes scattered all around the composition. Every single straight edge and mechanical shape is pre-planned, down to the size and color. However, all the organic round shapes and splatters are produced more sporadically.”
My work is a constant experiment, a balancing act of chaos and structure, explored through a variety of traditional media.”
After the figure is created digitally, Jones sketches it out on paper. Then, the initial sketch is scanned and further manipulated on Photoshop as the artist carefully arranges the geometric shapes and abstract elements. This digital composition is projected and traced. The rest of the process is executed entirely in traditional media. First, Jones begins by filling in translucent colors with watercolor or ink. Then, layers of Prismacolor pencils, water-soluble wax pastels (“The blending capabilities are almost endless, blending with my fingers and a blending stump, each revealing unique results.”) and water-soluble oil paint are layered onto the figure. The surrounding abstract elements are then rendered in acrylics.
We often turn to works for art for meaning, as if the artist is supposed to transmit an esoteric wisdom, an ideology that the viewer must decode from the images. And while Erik Jones doesn’t subscribe to this view of a painter as a shaman or philosopher, his visual experiments themselves behold another form of ingenuity that becomes apparent throughout his body of work: “I don’t purposefully dive into any certain conceptual endeavors when starting a painting. And I don’t necessarily have an opinion I’d like to articulate through painting. My work is a constant experiment, a balancing act of chaos and structure, explored through a variety of traditional media. Maybe that in itself is some sort of concept?”*
This article was originally published as the cover feature in Hi-Fructose Issue 27, whcih is sold out. Like what we do? Subscribe today and get our latest print issue as part of your subscription here.
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