Houston, TX.- The McMurtrey Gallery is proud to present “Jules Buck Jones: Totemomennomenclature”, on view at the gallery until August 27th. Austin based artist Jules Buck Jones will have his first solo exhibition in Houston at McMurtrey Gallery. Mr. Jones’ collages and drawings reflect his commitment to depicting nature and wild animals. Like a zoologist become artist, he not only gives his animal subjects an identity but a presence.
His work deals with animals. The depiction of animals through drawing and lore is as ancient as the imagination. The impressions and ideas they provoke range from symbolism to science. He makes large scale, 2-dimensioal drawings, sometimes bizarre and fantastic, other times simple and subtle. All of this stems from a long interest in the natural sciences. The work grows from thoughts and research on biological and ecological concerns as well as along narrative and mythical dimensions. He depicts his animals in various ways, using techniques inspired by the clear careful illustrations of field guides, through a range of expressive and abstract artists. A lot of his work bumps representation up against its limits. Abstraction comes into play in many ways. At times an animal, drawn in larger than life scale will melt away into aggressive strokes of color and marks, robbing the animal of its form. Other times I assemble animals into geometric formations, or I’ll attempt to merge scientific diagrams with the myths that precede them.
Jones work is very much about drawing itself. The line plays a crucial role in the development of his subject matter. He draws with a quick, gestural, playful delivery, which he believes gives the subject a liveliness that often eludes a slower, more meticulous, depiction. He uses a variety of media from all sorts of drawing tools, such as graphite, charcoal, and wax, to different water-based pigments as inks, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. He teams lines with washes to build or negate my subjects. Jones’ works strictly on paper, usually to a very large scale. To him, drawing has more of a romantic relationship to paper than to other surfaces, like wood or canvas. The paper allows his pencils to glide when they move and embraces his washes in some symbiotic manner. The grand scale creates a 1 to 1 ratio between work and viewer. Conceptually he believes this is interesting and intrinsic to the dialogue between man and nature. The scale is also conducive to the loose descriptions and allows a greater arena to suggest the infinite details nature provides.
Jones’ revels in the idea of continuing the long inscription of drawing, painting, sculpting and believing in animals, and takes his inspiration from prehistoric cave paintings, totemic symbols, the great artist/naturalists like Albertus Seba, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel and John James Audobon, and a contemporary art world increasingly more aware and intrigued with issues of the natural world. Fact and fiction, past, present and the future, all play a role in his work. He aims to express and conjure the flesh and magic of evolution, classification, environment, bio-diversity, mutation, and extinction. Jules Buck Jones received his Master in Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. Mr. Jones is included in the collections of the Austin Museum of Art, The Everglades National Park, and the Balcones Canyonland Preserve at Reicher Ranch in Austin and is a recipient of the David Price Endowed Presidential Scholaship in Art. Mr. Jones was the Artist in Residence In Everglades at the Everglades National Park in Florida. A book of his works titled Everglades inspired by his residency was published in 2010 by Monofnuspress. This summer he will be at the prestigious Skowhegan artists in residency program for emerging visual artists.
The McMurtrey Gallery, established in 1983, primarily represents contemporary regional artists. The gallery’s emphasis is on painting by both early and mid-career artists, many of whom are included in museum collections and are recognized and exhibited nationally. The gallery also represents a select group of internationally known photographers. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.mcmurtreygallery.com