December 8, 2020
@Matt JONES
The very face of the sky, 2020
Colored pencil on Stonehenge paper
22 x 30 inches
For the last eight months I’ve been working exclusively with colored pencil on paper at one end of a lab table in my apartment, with my partner teaching at the other end, and our greyhound sleeping nearby. The onset of the pandemic necessarily changed my practice. In material and emotional terms there was no possibility to maintain “business as usual” as an oil painter. The references in these drawings have become simultaneously more local (old growth forest, the impacts of climate change and the pandemic, a longing for friends and family, drug and alcohol addiction) and more mythical (medieval illumination, Rococo painting, open world gaming, folklore).’
—Matt Jones
Joachim Pissarro: Jones’s works completely reinvent the wheel with color pencil as a medium so that it becomes (to my eye, at least) almost impossible to differentiate between the subtlest caresses of the pencil, and the bombastic over-layered insistence of his crayon crushing on the surfaces.