{"id":26758,"date":"2014-10-07T00:35:03","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T06:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=26758"},"modified":"2025-10-24T07:54:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T14:54:50","slug":"artist-profile-earl-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/artist-profile-earl-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"Earl Jones: A Revolutionary Who Just Wants to Change the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A <\/span>decade ago, painter Earl Jones told this writer he liked to focus on \u201cimportant subjects: mountains and women.\u201d Recently he explained the quote: now-deceased Utah Supreme Court Justice I. Daniel Stewart attended a show of his and asked, \u201cHow come you [just] paint landscapes and nude women?\u201d Jones replied, \u201cI love to paint mountains, and there\u2019s only one thing more beautiful than a mountain.\u201d The justice responded, \u201cWell said.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Another show of Jones\u2019 signature mountains and women opens October 17 at Phillips Gallery along with sculpture by Cordell Taylor. It will be partially a retrospective and partly an exhibit of Jones\u2019 new work. Some pieces are quite singular \u2014 paintings \u201cwe\u2019ve just kind of kept in the family and decided that we have more than we really need,\u201d says the artist.<\/h4>\n

Jones\u2019 lovely, unabashed nudes (sometimes he delicately sculpts them in bronze) haven\u2019t always been so readily accepted. In the very early1960s, the annual art department student show was in the University of Utah Union, where now-sought-after artists Denis Phillips and Tony Smith hung their work alongside Jones\u2019 for what became a notorious exhibition.<\/h4>\n

As Tony Smith recalls it, President A. Ray Olpin\u2019s wife had a luncheon at the building one Saturday \u201cand some of the ladies took offense at several of the nude paintings from Alvin Gittins\u2019 figure-painting class. So the president had the show taken down,\u201d Smith writes in an email. \u00a0\u201cAlvin gets upset, saying, \u2018How can I teach this stuff, and not have it acceptable to be shown in public?\u2019 We get all incensed and make signs and picket the Park Building decrying CENSORSHIP. A lotta press. Jim Haseltine [director of the Salt Lake Art Center, then located at Finch Lane] hangs the paintings, to record crowds, and Earl, Denis, Steve Beck and I kinda get carried away with the thought that we are Revolutionaries and later founded the local chapter of the Peace and Freedom Party against the Vietnam War and, among other things, ran Eldridge Cleaver for president.\u201d<\/h4>\n

That\u2019s what artists were up to \u201cback in the day.\u201d<\/h4>\n

After graduating, then training at the Art Students League in New York with figure painter Joseph Hirsch and doing some traveling in Europe, Jones entered the U\u2019s graduate program and taught drawing and painting classes at Finch Lane. He earned a master\u2019s degree and became a full-time faculty member at the U from about 1962 until the roof caved in on him seven years later. He had been a very visible campus leader in the effort against the Vietnam War and led protests opposing the university\u2019s research in chemical and biological warfare. Denied tenure (he says it was the best thing that could have happened to him) he struck out on his own, teaching privately in his studio. It wasn\u2019t easy \u2013 Jill B. Jones, his wife now of 55 years (they met at a Sigma Nu fraternity party \u2013 Jones, Smith, Beck and the late College of Fine Arts Dean Robert Olpin were all members), worked to support the family until he could \u201cget some momentum going,\u201d putting off obtaining her Ph.D. in social work from Bryn Mawr until his career was well established.<\/h4>\n

Jones, 77, still lives and works in Salt Lake City in the one-time Phillips gas station that now has been extensively remodeled. Though he tired of teaching after 35 years, until recently former students and colleagues would drop in weekly for a sort of life-drawing soiree. Everyone chipped in five bucks for a live model who posed on a mechanic\u2019s hoist which, in an earlier life, elevated vehicles in need of repair \u2013 it has become an Earl Jones legend.<\/h4>\n
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Although he says he doesn\u2019t work much these days, Jones prefers to paint on-site, something he likes to do with his old friend Denis Phillips. \u201cThere\u2019s an energy that happens when you paint on location \u2013 it\u2019s the urgency that produces spontaneity,\u201d he says. \u201cOutdoors with the breeze going, the light changing, the bugs biting, there are a thousand distractions that create an urgent situation. You\u2019ve got to get these things down before it changes.\u201d<\/h4>\n

There is a decided abstraction evident in his realism and an intentional strength to the simplicity in the composition of his pictures. Jones first visually frames the portion of a landscape he wants to paint and sketches major features with his brush. Occasionally he will leave the outline to set off a rock or tree, making it visually pop. He lays down a thin, often transparent layer of paint (sometimes allowing the texture of his canvas to show through), a technique that gives his pictures a pleasing luminescence. His landscapes seem to gather light and then reflect it; they are best seen spotlighted, as Jones demonstrates on his own walls.<\/h4>\n

The open-space living area of his home is sparsely furnished with old family pieces, including his great-grandmother\u2019s bed graced by the richly hued nude hanging beside it. He mentions that for 20 years he raised homing pigeons on the top floor, something he enjoyed as a boy, but allergies caused him to give the birds to a neighbor in the days leading up to our interview.\u00a0 In the dining area, Jones shows off elaborate cupboard doors that he carved himself in the style of Nicolai Fechin, a favorite artist who lived in Taos. Artwork abounds \u2014 by the artist, his three talented children, and by a few Utah painters including Ed Maryon and former Jones\u2019 student Dan Baxter. Downstairs, just outside the studio, there is a 1990 calendar page from the old Cosmic Aeroplane with art by daughter Sarah. Elsewhere, silky paint bedecks an early Chevy pickup truck, 1955 (\u201cthe year I graduated from high school,\u201d Jones remarks). The artist borrowed $400 to buy it 48 years ago and has been restoring it for the past 15.<\/h4>\n

He also has been busy building a cabin on family land near Malad, Idaho. \u201cI found an old log house from nearby that had been torn down, but all the logs had been numbered so you could put them back in the same order\u00a0 . . . I\u2019m going to do some gardening up there \u2013 I\u2019m really interested in organic gardening.\u201d Jones added a front porch and a second-story studio and paints there whenever he can get away. He calls the area a junkyard, with old school buses and abandoned cars strewn about the land, but he includes those in his paintings with the breathtaking Great Basin mountain range rising behind. At least one of these works will be in the Phillips show.<\/h4>\n

A fifth-generation Utahn, Jones grew up in Ogden where he had a \u201cpretty good\u201d high school art teacher but says \u201cgenerally my consciousness was that of a country hick. When I went to the university I was culturally disabled and undeveloped\u00a0 . . . I needed an education and I suffered from provinciality and I knew it.\u201d<\/h4>\n

He appreciated Alvin Gittins and Doug Snow and other professors, but thought LeConte Stewart \u201cwas like an old fuddy duddy. He\u2019d traveled around Davis County and Weber County and Morgan County painting stuff that I grew up with. It made me nervous to look at LeConte Stewart \u2013 obviously it was well painted but it just didn\u2019t have the fire or the energy that I was looking for and it took me a long time because I was trying to overcome my provinciality \u2013 I didn\u2019t want to\u00a0know<\/em>\u00a0that I was from Weber County, I wanted to transcend that. I got out of there as quickly as I could after I graduated from high school . . . and it wasn\u2019t until I came back and realized what a\u00a0gem\u00a0<\/em>he was because he took the beauties of the scenes and the objects and the communities of my ancestors and my family and made it into significant art.<\/h4>\n

\u201cLeConte overcame his provinciality by leaving Salt Lake, he went to Chicago, he went to New York when he was really young, and he came back with a full understanding and appreciation of his own roots. So LeConte was painting\u00a0my<\/em>\u00a0roots and that\u2019s what was making me so nervous. Because I wasn\u2019t mature enough or developed enough to recognize the value of my own roots. That was an enormously liberating discovery \u2014 LeConte was telling me about my roots . . . So I became very interested in genealogy and history and LeConte Stewart was undoubtedly the best and most important artist ever to come out of Utah at least during this period.\u201d<\/h4>\n

A past revolutionary, Jones still wants to change the world. His main issue is the environment. Many of his paintings portray what he calls \u201cthe edges,\u201d places where the cultivated, inhabited landscape of man \u201cmeets the landscape where man isn\u2019t.\u201d He won\u2019t paint condo projects, instead focusing on elements in the landscape he says have legitimacy there: farmhouses, fences, barns. But he has some guilt about \u201clooking the other way.\u201d As he told Will South in\u00a0Southwest Art<\/em>\u00a0in 1987, \u201cIt\u2019s difficult for me to turn my back on some great blight on the land in order to pick out some more agreeable scene across the road. Is it irresponsible for me to do that? Am I only pandering to people who want nice pictures? The truth is I want nice pictures! I have to keep alive my excitement for the way things could be. Better harmony between man and nature shouldn\u2019t be that difficult. . . . Each picture can become a metaphor for hope.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Jones is a dazzling conversationalist who can begin by saying that LeConte Stewart couldn\u2019t handle greens, \u201cwas almost paralyzed by the greenness of things,\u201d move on to Josef Albers and ripe tomatoes, Einstein, Karl Marx, the Greeks, the Catholic Church, original sin, political conservatism, situational ethics, and then tie it all neatly together with a statement on absolute color and relativity.<\/h4>\n

Sometimes, the very best thing is to just listen to what he has to say.<\/h4>\n

\u201cI used to tell my students when you\u2019re doing landscape painting what you have to do is go out and drive around or walk around until you find the right attitude. If you find it you can make a painting out of anything. It\u2019s not finding the right subject; it\u2019s finding the right attitude. Because once you get into recognizing the possibility of what you\u2019re seeing, there are things all around you. I have a hard time getting started sometimes because I\u2019m looking for something far too perfect. But once I get started painting I realize that, God, I could paint that over there, I could paint that over there, I could paint that over there.<\/h4>\n

\u201cI remember a friend of mine saying\u00a0you<\/em>\u00a0might look at a forest and see the green and the purple and the shapes and patterns but a capitalist sees only lumber. We\u2019re all highly infected with that perspective. It\u2019s alienating and blinding, insensitive and vulgar. And so for me going out painting is an exercise in trying to overcome what I call \u2018ordinary consciousness.\u2019 Ordinary consciousness can blind you to the world\u2019s beautiful magnificence, variety and possibility. So I think in a way we\u2019re all crazy. Our culture is crazy. And painting is at least a momentary opportunity to overcome that.\u201d<\/h4>\n

He adds: \u201cI\u2019m anti-capitalist, have been since I was about 30. Our culture is finally waking up to that. You know that [climate crisis] demonstration in New York the other day? That\u2019s the problem. All they can see is lumber. And the only way they know how to defend their lumber is with war. I hope I live long enough to see some changes.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Let\u2019s hope we all do.<\/h4>\n
<\/div>\n

Earl Jones & Cordell Taylor<\/em>\u00a0will be at\u00a0Phillips Gallery<\/a>, 444 E. 200 South, \u00a0October 17 \u2013 November 14, with an opening reception October 17, 6-9 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In anticipation of his upcoming show at Phillips Gallery, Ann Poore talks with Earl Jones about art, life and revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":26794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/earl_jones.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-24 21:18:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26758"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97394,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758\/revisions\/97394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}