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Sentient Beings – Recent Paintings by Mark Jones
4th – 24th January, 2008
Sunjin Galleries in Singapore is pleased to announce and exhibition of paintings be the American artist Mark Jones.
Jones’ remarkable paintings are a refreshing mixture of Renaissance painting techniques and a decidedly Post – Modern approach to subject matter. Jones spent the formative years of his training as an artist in the Netherlands studying the great masters of 17th Century Dutch art. The rich, golden light of paintings by artist such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Frans Hals seems born again in Jones’ “portraits” of cows and bulls. Landscapes are populated with cows grazing on golf course greens or watching television in a pasture. The paintings are created using an oil glazing technique that builds color via the application of many thin layers of nearly transparent paint producing a stained glass like effect on the under painting.
These paintings speak to polarities of nature and culture, art and commerce, natural and unnatural. Cows (and bulls) have been a subject for artists since the earliest cave paintings at Lascaux more than 15000 years ago. They are found in the art and religion of nearly every culture since that time, as gods, symbols and sacrificial offerings. In their relationship to us, cows occupy that intermediate space between wild animal and domestic pet, just as the other elements in Jones’ paintings inhabit the space between our ideas. The televisions (neither purely art nor purely commerce) and the golf courses which are part natural environment, part pesticide reliant, fertilizer based, mono-cultures, ask the viewer to reexamine our relationship to the natural world and the conceptual filters which help us define our place in it.
Mark Jones is a Professor of Art at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York where he has been teaching painting and photography since 1985. His first major solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1970 and he has continued to exhibit his work widely since then in the United States, Europe and Asia. His work is the collection of many public and private collections throughout the world.
Jones’ remarkable paintings are a refreshing mixture of Renaissance painting techniques and a decidedly Post – Modern approach to subject matter. Jones spent the formative years of his training as an artist in the Netherlands studying the great masters of 17th Century Dutch art. The rich, golden light of paintings by artist such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Frans Hals seems born again in Jones’ “portraits” of cows and bulls. Landscapes are populated with cows grazing on golf course greens or watching television in a pasture. The paintings are created using an oil glazing technique that builds color via the application of many thin layers of nearly transparent paint producing a stained glass like effect on the under painting.
These paintings speak to polarities of nature and culture, art and commerce, natural and unnatural. Cows (and bulls) have been a subject for artists since the earliest cave paintings at Lascaux more than 15000 years ago. They are found in the art and religion of nearly every culture since that time, as gods, symbols and sacrificial offerings. In their relationship to us, cows occupy that intermediate space between wild animal and domestic pet, just as the other elements in Jones’ paintings inhabit the space between our ideas. The televisions (neither purely art nor purely commerce) and the golf courses which are part natural environment, part pesticide reliant, fertilizer based, mono-cultures, ask the viewer to reexamine our relationship to the natural world and the conceptual filters which help us define our place in it.
Mark Jones is a Professor of Art at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York where he has been teaching painting and photography since 1985. His first major solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1970 and he has continued to exhibit his work widely since then in the United States, Europe and Asia. His work is the collection of many public and private collections throughout the world.
