Bryan Jones

Artist Bryan Jones began his painting career in the early-2000’s with a series of work that explores abstract realism.  His highly-detailed images of still life arrangements made from wax, fabric, and cosmetics combine figural elements inspired by Peter Paul Reubens and the rococo, while also enveloping a critical inquiry of abstraction’s sensory effect(s).  Jones’s keen eye and hand articulate unexpected observations, contradictory forms that exist both artificially and in actuality, intentionally created to evoke visceral viewer responses. Beautifully gruesome, these paintings poke at textural memory via their organic matter likenesses.   

More recently, Jones’s oil paintings have evolved to also include the process of montage.  While he continues to investigate the space between, and overlap of, abstraction and reality, Jones’s work unpacks the conventions of landscape painting.  His labor-intensive process first combines original nature photographs with appropriated image fragments in collage compositions.  Jones then creates a painting of this image, but adds multidimensional complexity to the work through the act of layering.  With the aid of painter’s tape, Jones blends a number of nature collage paintings onto a single surface, interweaving their forms in an effort to simultaneously synthesize and disband their common ground.  What results are paintings that reference nature’s familiarity despite the conclusion that such images exist in paint.

Jones holds a B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and a M.A. in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University.  He currently lives outside of Nashville amidst the forest of Kingston Springs, TN, surrounded by the environment that maintains his steadfast inspiration.