Painter Of Dreams: Fay Jones Creates A Unique World

Writers of fiction often complain that their characters refuse to behave. The guy who was supposed to die refuses to croak. The woman who was meant to marry the butcher elopes with his younger brother.

Seattle painter Fay Jones runs into similar surprises.

The characters who inhabit her paintings can be downright unruly. Take the woman in her recent painting "Fate." Jones tried and tried to paint legs underneath that fat-skirted tutu, but the legs refused to stay. The woman ended up legless. (Also bald, but that's not unusual in Jones' tableaux. About half the people in her paintings have heads as smooth as eggs.)

Equally perplexing in "Fate" was the appearance of three donkeys in the top corner - a kind of Greek chorus of big-eared beasts who seem to be floating like clouds.

"I think I must work like a writer," says Jones, who seems to enjoy the idea that her paintings have lives of their own. "I have a cast of characters and I have an idea, but the idea doesn't always fall into place the way I intend it to."

Artists often change their minds in midstream about how a painting or sculpture will come out. But because Jones works in a figurative style, things that surprise her can also surprise the viewer. Who can tell if an abstract painter decides to move a square from one side of the canvas to the other? But a woman with no legs, a rabbit suspended in space wearing boxing gloves, an upside-down sailor smoking a pipe - that's unusual.

Such idiosyncrasies and unexpected moments are what Jones' admirers have come to expect.

In the 25 years that she has been showing her work in Seattle and elsewhere, Jones has become known as a painter of dreams, an artist who succeeds in portraying complex emotions and complicated relationships in paintings that are deceptively playful. The events in her paintings seem to take place outside of real time, in places that are exotic and out of the ordinary, though it would be impossible to say just where. The backdrops for her paintings are in the land of the imagination rather than any place that could be found on a map.

Her latest work, on view through the end of April at Grover/Thurston Gallery in Pioneer Square, is filled with her usual cast of cartoonish characters, including her donkeys, hares and sailors. As always, the paintings look "flat" because Jones doesn't bother differentiating much between foreground and background. (She says this has to do with her eyesight: "I'm extremely myopic and have an astigmatism," she says. "Even with corrected eyesight I think you see things differently.")

The "flatness" of her work, combined with her use of sumi painting and the Asian look of her characters, suggests to many viewers that Jones is either Asian American or has spent time in Asia. Neither is true. She simply loves sumi painting and the aesthetic qualities of sumi ink.

"I use it in a very crude, Western way," says Jones. "But it's a black that's so different than paint; it has a kind of sheen to it and it layers differently than anything else." Along with sumi, Jones also uses acrylic paint and works mostly on paper.

As usual, the new paintings seem narrative, though the actual story being told in each one is sometimes shadowy and tinged with mystery.

A few are easy to read. Jones' work is often humorous - not big belly-laugh humor, but subtle ironies and wry jokes that take few minutes to catch. In "Soup," for instance, there's a duck in a transparent tureen whose bill is shaped like a soup spoon. Other possible soup ingredients, such as an eel and a fish, float around in the space outside the tureen. But what about the horse (or is it another donkey)? And the mermaid? Are they fated for the soup, too?

Other paintings are more enigmatic. A painting called "Hair" shows a woman whose long black tresses are braided and wrapped as they float off in space behind her. A figure in front of her - bald except for an elaborate braid - relaxes langorously, head on hand. Behind is a third figure, a long hank of black hair draped over her wrists as though it were a robe for a queen. Disembodied heads float around in the painting, one of which seems to be whispering into the ear of the central character.

Jones says the painting was inspired by her thoughts of women caring for each other's hair, performing intimate, friendly grooming rituals. But then the hair seemed to take over. It lifted up, floated off.

"The hair is not very real looking," Jones says. "But I liked it that way."

Though Jones, 59, is an outgoing woman who obviously loves a good discussion, she hedges on questions about what her paintings mean. She'll mention a certain antique Chinese scroll that inspired a figure in one recent painting, or admit that a large painting she did in 1990 - which is now part of the decor at Nishino restaurant in Madison Valley - has references to her life. She painted it not long after her brother was killed and a grandchild was born. The painting is called "Touch and Go" and is about the fragility of life, the cycles of death and birth. Among the cast of characters in that painting is one of her familiar "Buddha babies" - round, bald babies with beatific expressions.

Jones' compositions are about relationships between people, whether they're lovers, strangers or friends. A surreptitious look between them, an expression of fear, resignation in the mouth of another, hint at the complexity of what is taking place. Rarely is there a single person or image in Jones' scenes. The density of activity, combined with the large size of her paintings - some are 6 feet by 9 feet or larger - often give them the look of murals. Prices for her work range from $2,000 to about $16,000.

One of Jones' most public works is a mural. She is one of the artists who created a mural for the Metro tunnel at Westlake Center. Her work also has been shown at virtually every museum in the Pacific Northwest and at gallery shows from Portland to Missoula. Until last year she was represented by Francine Seders Gallery, where she had shows about every other year, starting in 1970. She also recently has started doing illustrations for the New Yorker magazine.

It's fair to say that Jones is one of the region's most prolific and distinctive painters, and in recognition of that fact, the Boise Art Museum is organizing a 25-year retrospective for Jones. It will be exhibited in Boise this fall and come to the Seattle Art Museum in March 1997.

A native of western Massachusetts who decided at an early age to become an artist, Jones entered the Rhode Island School of Design at 17. She met her husband, painter Robert Jones, at the school, graduated at 20 and had four children before she was 30. When her husband got a job teaching at the University of Washington art department in the mid-1960s, the family moved to Seattle.

But, even with four small children, Jones never gave up her art.

"When the kids were young, I worked public-school hours," Jones said. "I didn't do anything else. I didn't do the laundry, and I trained my friends not to bother me during the day. As soon as the kids came home from school, I put down the brush and that was it for the day.

"By inclination I operate well out of chaos, I like extracting things out of complexity," Jones said. "So having a big family really made me work harder rather than using it as an excuse."

Jones also says that being a woman who studied art at a time when women artists were rarely mentioned in art history courses - Jones graduated from RISD in 1957 - means that she has never felt bound by art-world conventions. That could help explain her lack of interest in foreground, background, perspective, realistic rendering and other conventions usually considered part and parcel of successful Western art.

"Since I didn't see any art by women," she reflects, "I felt very free not to bow to the rules."

----------------------- WHERE TO SEE JONES' ART -----------------------

New paintings by Fay Jones are at Grover/Thurston Gallery, 309 Occidental S., Pioneer Square, through April 27. Hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.