OCT 18 - NOV 29, 2025
Artist reception Saturday, Oct 18 from 5-7 pm
This exhibition presents nine new paintings by legendary Seattle artist Fay Jones. Created over the course of the past year, these large-scale paintings present Jones’s signature cast of characters engaged in playfully enigmatic tableaux. Recurrent figures from Jones's oeuvre such as the gambler (a silhouetted figure wearing a fedora), mischievous rabbits, mermaids as well as figures from the artist's own life lend the paintings a variety of emotional registers from the persistence of grief to finding humor in aging to the delights of intergenerational bonding. Beyond their rich layers of associative meanings, this collection of artworks showcases Jones's distinct approach to painting where she laboriously and rhythmically builds layers of acrylic paint on Okawara paper, often collaging and reworking particular elements to achieve carefully considered relationships among space, line and color.
Jones, who was born in Boston and attended The Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1950s, has resided on the West Coast since the 1960s, where she raised her family while refining her practice as an artist. These new paintings reflect Jones's keen observations of life as both a dedicated practitioner of her medium and a grandmother. The largest piece in the exhibition, Nightfall presents a warm, moonlit scene of adults, teenagers and children gathered together. A shooting star in the night sky punctuates the scene underscoring the ephemeral, poignant nature of cross-generational gatherings. White Glove Poet with Wrap-Around Muse features a poem written by one of Jones's adult grandchildren, Mariah, where phrases like “Salt Water Seeker” and “Riptide of Eternity” offer a rich variety of imagistic associations that complement the aquatic imagery of the painting. Other works such as Day and Night balance larger existential concerns and dreamlike symbols with details drawn from the artist's daily life, such as the changing view outside Jones’s bedroom window.
With this new collection of paintings, Jones, who turned eighty-nine this past year, continues to demonstrate her position as one of the foremost figurative painters working in the Pacific Northwest. The dedicated rhythms of Jones's practice imbue Persephone with an energy of cyclicality and renewal as a portrait of the Greek goddess who was taken to the underworld by her uncle Hades, and whose annual return to the land of living serves as the embodiment of Spring. Taken together, Jones's paintings exude her ongoing commitment to rendering life in all its fullness—of balancing loss with joy, of finding the humor in a curving spine, and of diving into life's many mysteries with curiosity and wit.
- David Strand
Pricing available upon request.