RICHMOND, VA.- The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) presents Big Pink Paintings: Abstract Paintings 2008-11 by Martha Jones is on view July 16, 2011 through November 13, 2011. This exhibition of recent works by Martha Jones features oil paintings based on a consistent set of elements that call on the viewer to think about issues of color, scale, and abstraction within an artistic tradition. These recurring elements derive primarily from the artistic conventions of ancient Greece and Rome, which, while known primarily for figurative art, employed a set of repeated abstract forms as a common parlance. Of these the arch and the meander patterns have consistently demonstrated the greatest capacity to transform themselves into other forms, including the imagery of waves, clouds, bubbles, heads, hearts, letters of the alphabet, potatoes, aluminum cans, toes, as well as others the artist may not have intended. The