ROGER L. JONES
Why I paint
My look at the visual world is a search for meaning that may be conveyed by painting in oil, acrylic, and digital media.
Painting, with the help of drawing and photographing, allows me to pursue visual thinking. The process of painting on a two dimensional surface provides a place to find patterns or compositional ideas to make art.
Nature is a wonderful source of inspiration.
The natural order of things being discovered and revealed by scientists is much appreciated.
A study of fine art at the University of Washington provided exposure to many insights of art professors and students working to create art. Being exposed to the many efforts of artists' pursuits helps to create a visual vocabulary beyond what one could do individually.
While painting, an open-ended approach, rather than a pre-conceived vision, allows for subtle discoveries and more depth of surface. Sometimes a photographic study to catch a subject's character may be used.
Finding color that creates a natural presence has been important to my aesthetic palette. A study of how line is seen, space is indicated by color, and the positive-negative shape relationship is fascinating to me. Most often a single primary light source is imagined to reveal form when painting figurative landscapes.
After having used horizontal-vertical grids to make patterns to unify and to translate images to canvas, I discovered that using curvilinear grid lines helps to create exciting effects in abstract paintings.
The use of color as a measure of space is intriguing. Mixing the appropriate paint colors to indicate spatial order requires a special skill. Depth in water or solutions can be indicated through color mixing.
