Close to Home: Jonah puts his Somerset backyard on show
With Close to Home, Jonah Jones shows where his focus has been in the three years since his art was last on display. It’s easy to understand why. A walk through his backyard is a tour of endemic and native trees, interesting foliage and an ongoing parade of birds. Should he want to switch things up, there is the ever-changing brilliance of King’s Point.
“I've called it Close to Home because, increasingly, as I've got older, I've been painting more and more around my environment here,” the artist said.
“We've been living in Somerset now for, I think 20-odd of the 35 years we've lived on the island and we ended up buying a house right up in Somerset, with some lovely land around it. It's become a real creative space for me and that’s what's coming out in the art.”
Close to Home will have about 80 paintings when it opens on Friday in the main gallery at Bermuda Society of Arts.
The odd picture out is another favoured location of Mr Jones, Flatts Inlet.
“All the other work is within a stone’s throw of where I live.”
With nearly four decades of art behind him the artist decided to include as part of his solo exhibit, a timeline of his work.
It will run in the Edinburgh Gallery at BSoA, as an accompaniment to Close to Home. The pieces are not for sale, some were borrowed from the people who bought them.
“I think it might be kind of interesting for people to see in the main gallery what I'm doing now, and then going back through the years from when I was in Bermuda College in ‘92.
“It's funny. You look at your earlier work and it can be quite painful to be honest, because you're in a different place years later,” said Mr Jones, who came to the island as a chef.
“Having said that, sometimes when I look at earlier work, there might be a rawness and enthusiasm and immediacy which, maybe now it's more measured. Personally, I see a road to gradual improvement. Virtuosity, I suppose, is what we're all trying to head towards.”
Social restrictions brought on by the pandemic were in place at the opening of Mr Jones’s last show, in 2021.
“I think we were allowed 50 people in the gallery at the time, so we had to have somebody counting people into the art society,” he said. “It was quite a bizarre time. It was surreal.”
Mr Jones created much of his upcoming show in the studio at his home.
“I'll have them lying around for weeks, or months, as I work on them. Some of them, it’s a one-shot deal, some of the smaller works will be done in a couple of sessions, but I've got one piece which is a diptych and it's 19 feet long. It took a long time. I think I probably worked on it over two years,” he said.
“There's not 80 huge paintings. I think there's four or five large pieces, and then they go down in size from there.”
There is a philanthropic side to the artist, Jonah Jones.
At Friday’s opening of Close to Home he will auction off pieces of art as a charity fundraiser.
He and his wife, Jo Stanton, selected Out Bermuda, Bermuda Cancer and Health Centre, Pals, the Bermuda National Trust and the Bermuda Audubon Society as organisations they wanted to support.
“I wanted to do a sort of give back. I've got five smaller pieces which we're going to be putting up for a live auction on the night,” he said.
People will write their bid on a piece of paper. The highest bidder will get to take the painting home.
“I have done it before but I don't think I've done five in one sitting,” Mr Jones said. “They’re all charities that are important to Jo and I, that we like to support.”
While Mr Jones’s backyard has been an inspiration for his art it is also a distraction from it.
“The property where we live now is kind of a big, long-term art project in itself. I'm spending a lot of time in the garden. It's almost like a huge piece of sculpture and obviously, it does take away from time in the studio but I consider it all part of the creative process,” he said.
“It’s a long way of saying I don't know what sort of work I'm going to be doing into the future. I'm sure I'll still paint, but maybe I'll start doing some sculpture for the garden or something.
“So it could be a sort of bit of an end of an era to some degree. I just don't know.”
Also on his mind is that at the age of 58, the creative spirit he had when he first started painting isn’t the same.
“The work’s more measured, it's taking me longer. It's a different kind of energy you have as you get older,” he said.
“In my studio at the moment, as part of this timeline exhibition, I've got a piece of canvas. I'm trying to literally do a timeline to show people when I was at college, where I was living during those three-and-a-half decades in Bermuda, and the shows that happened, and it's quite shocking because each few inches is a piece of your life and you think, well, how many more left?”
• Close to Home opens at the Bermuda Society of Arts on Friday at 5.30pm. The exhibit will run until October 9. For more information visit bsoa.bm
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