Today we’d like to introduce you to Randall Jones.
Hi Randall, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I really don’t know when I first got myself kind of tangled up in the webby, sticky struggle of I guess what we could call “creative work”. It’s kind of an embarrassing and goofy truth but I think it was around the time of being a little death-obsessed teenager. I just really felt the weight of that reality. That people die, and that I was going to die someday too. That really lit this little fire of documenting the world as it is right now. Documenting what felt to me like insanely bizarre stuff happening on this little dust speck in space that no one else around me as a kid seemed to be freaking out about. I guess I just had a lot of questions and a lot going on inside as a young person, and I was pretty shy and it felt like something was going wrong in-between my brain and the words actually coming out when I talked to people. I just liked the interior me more. Words didn’t land the way I wanted, and the only way to work out the thoughts or let go of some of that feeling was to capture it in a photo or a song or a drawing. Imagine waking up before everyone and seeing this beautiful morning light on your sleeping family dog. Then the light moves and everyone gets up from bed and you try to tell them “wow the light on the dog this morning was so beautiful”. It’s just not the same to people. Language isn’t cutting it you know? It’s describing your dream to someone vs experiencing it. So out of all of this, the kind of painting I do now is just trying to illustrate this zoomed out view of the world as a whole and this zoomed in view of my daily experience at the same time.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think the biggest struggle has been this daily sort of turmoil that you give yourself as a trade for self-expression. This looming imposter syndrome mixed with a thousand thoughts a day flying at you of “where is this artwork headed, and out of all the possible types of artwork, how do I know that this style is the most authentic to me? And really, why did I choose painting? Is it really the best way to say what I’m trying to get at? Why not writing, why not photography? And what do I even have to say that’s halfway interesting? Okay great you’re painting people in your life with oil paint. It’s been done and done better for over a thousand years.” You know what I mean? You’re getting kind of mentally beat up everyday so that hopefully a day will come where you’ve found a way to articulate a part of yourself, or your experience, or about the nature of beauty or truth or something. And the getting beat up is totally voluntary, where the whole time you could have just been surfing or hiking or having a good talk on the porch with your friend. But every person who makes things willingly goes through the mental hurdles everyday and I’m still not sure if it’s worth it, but I still do it everyday, so I must believe that it is. I really don’t know any other way to be.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Right now, I really create two kinds of paintings that serve different purposes for me. I make oil paintings of daily moments in my life or these more surreal kind of collage paintings. I need the surreal element sometimes to help articulate something about the world as it’s felt, and not always just as it appears. And I need the daily moment paintings as a way to really meditate on these small moments for months. Painting them as a way of exploring every subtlety of light on my friend’s nose, or of exploring how all the leaves on the ground are, if you look really close, just slightly different colors. I love how slow painting is in that way. I love to look at a painted moment in someone’s life and know that they spent a hundred hours with that moment. It’s a nice way to get to stay somewhere a little longer than life allows us.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
I’m sure there are at least hundreds of people who really deserve so much of the credit in pushing me to be the artist that I am now. Some of them I can barely remember their names and faces, you know? I was just thinking about that the other day. Being able to work out thoughts alone and show my grade school art teacher that I have the same birthday as Picasso and I took that to mean something as a kid, switching to a drawing class in high school so I could talk to a girl. My dad’s old friend from when he was growing up who I’ve never met is an amazing painter, how much did that influence me just hearing the stories of how his artwork impressed my dad? So I wonder. I will say that there are people who I look up to for their artwork but also them as people. That they embodied what being an artist was to me. There’s a lot I could name, but I will say Emilio Villalba, who is probably my favorite painter at the moment is a big one. My painting professor, Christian Fagerlund, also was and remains one of the biggest inspirations for me. Working artist, college art professor, but more importantly, being those things while an example of such a kind and caring human, willing to help those people who want to explore this bizarre creative life. If at the end of all of this, I can have scratched the surface of being that kind of person, than all the creative struggle will have been worth it. For me, when I’m in the foggy creative struggle, that’s the faint and distant light I’m trying to head toward.
Contact Info:
- Email: randalljonesart@gmail.com
- Website: randalljonesart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/randalljonesart/
