Jane Jones has an admirable gift for banishing extraneous details in order to focus on the elegance of flowers, juxtaposing their organic forms with the geometric rigidity of their vases, and the stones she sometimes includes, and even of the square or rectangular canvas itself. Her still life paintings highlight what Jones calls the "everyday triumphs of nature" and the "power, beauty, and fragility of life," none of which should ever be taken for granted.
Peter Trippi, Editor-in-Chief, Fine Art Connoisseur, New York, NY
This exhibit was a wonderful surprise. People really love it. They hated to see it go.
Alvaro Ramos, Vice President of Exhibitions, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago Academy of Sciences, Chicago, IL
The paintings are gorgeous and huge! They really dominate our space. I think our audience is going to be so pleased to see them . . .
Michelle Stempien, Curator, The Holland Museum, Holland, MI
The Jane Jones' floral art museum exhibit is exceptional -- powerful, beautiful, dynamic, and relevant.
Ricki L. Levine, Executive Director, The Holland Museum, Holland, MI
From Genesis 2:8-9 where God ‘planted a garden eastwards in Eden’ to 17th century Jan Van Kessel the Elder’s exquisitely detailed portrayal of Vertumnus—guardian of gardens, to early 20th century works like Odilon Redon’s Flowers in a Turquoise Vase (1905), human aesthetic rapture has found its myriad safe havens and perennial longing in botany. Jane Jones, like few contemporary American painters, has invented a most elegant way of communicating the rapture and metaphysics of a flower. She does so with a technically photorealistic honesty and fluency that is poignant and astonishing. Jones’ work is both stark and lush; a vivid wake-up call. It declares the innocence, vulnerability and gorgeous allure of the more than 370,000 flowering plant species on Earth. Her work will stand as a unique rallying cry, an open and perfumed invitation to be re-enchanted by all that grows and co-evolves with us.
Michael Charles Tobias, President, Dancing Star Foundation, Sante Fe, NM
Perfect conditions for a new and important form of painting aligned in the 17th century in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Amsterdam had become the financial center of Europe with the continent’s highest income per capita. Global expansion of the Dutch East and West Trading Companies brought new goods with every shipment, including exotic botanical specimens. Secular acceptance of Scientific Method had begun to free scientific inquiry from religion and myth, while the big science of the day—exploration—manifest itself in collections of natural history specimens amassed by affluent collectors, who also collected art. Demand for floral art was supplied by painters who possessed scientific understanding and skill which they had honed as scientific illustrators. Collectively, this was the nexus of The Golden Age of Dutch Floral Painting.
The genre lives on today, but contextualized by modernity. In the paintings of Jane Jones, flowers are icons, but not merely of beauty or taxonomy. Her paintings embody a 21st-century sensibility of concern yet hope about destructive forces that puts nature in peril, and this layer has the transformative effect of elevating her paintings into prayers . . . reverent prayers for the botanical health of the world. Jane Jones explores flowers in exquisite detail. She also explores their fragility and their metaphysics. Her paintings celebrate beauty, but they also reveal the necessity to protect flowers. While Jane Jones has been a life-long student of 17th-century Dutch floral painting, she takes a contemporary stylistic approach to her own work through spare composition that excludes extraneous details of the external world in order to focus on a moment of elegance, harmony, and dignity. Consequently, her paintings seem to meditate on nature.
Having earned undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry and a Master’s degree in Art History, Jane Jones says, “The most important things I have taken away from my science education is a deep respect for living systems and ecology, their inherent homeostasis, and the importance of precision when observing nature. . . . [while] years of teaching art history have taught me to dive deeply into the historical and social context of the lives of the great artists of past centuries, and to incorporate some of their techniques and ideas into my own artwork.”
Jane Jones’ paintings have won accolades and awards including an Award of Excellence in Blossoms II ~ Art of Flowers sponsored by The Susan K. Black Foundation, which premiered at The Naples Museum of Art in 2011, and the Floral Award in the Annual Exhibition of the International Guild of Realism in 2013 and 2018. She is the author of Classic Still Life Painting and is represented by galleries in Boston, Denver, New York, Santa Fe, and Scottsdale.
