about
Jill Jones

Jill Jones holds degrees from the University of South Carolina and Converse College. Working primarily in oils and pastel, she has had work included in exhibitions juried by such prestigious curators as Lilian Tone of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, nationally-known artist Burton Silverman and internationally-known artist and illustrator Sue Coe. Her work has garnered numerous awards, including Best of Shows from Upstate Visual Arts in Greenville, SC, the Anderson County Juried Exhibition in Anderson, SC and the Artists’ Guild of Spartanburg.

Jones focuses almost exclusively on landscapes, painting largely from memory of a childhood spent in the rural Upstate of South Carolina. The scenes are pointedly simple – fields overtaken my kudzu, forgotten peach orchards and overgrown fields – and recall long days spent on horseback exploring her surroundings. But the work is less sentimental than it is dark and moody, with something of an existential quality.

“To me, all landscapes are self portraits,” Jones says. “Trees serve as surrogates for the human form. Skies reflect mood. Even the lay of the land, whether rolling and expansive or flat and confined, represents less the world around me than a world within.”

She expresses this with a simplified language of color and form, using a grayed-down palette of greens, blues and violets. She often begins a painting with nothing more than a general idea of what she wants to express: the contrast of a shady path that empties into white-hot sunlight; the silhouette of a hedge at dusk; an eerily still yellow sky.  “I prefer to err on the side of simplicity. Too much information and the mystery is spoiled. That’s why I paint from memory. It helps me edit extraneous details and focus on shape and shadow, mood and feeling – the elements of landscape painting I like most.”

Jones has been represented since 2002 by Elder Gallery in Charlotte, where she has been featured in both solo and two-person shows, as well as regular gallery exhibitions. Her work is included in private and corporate collections across the United States.