Scott Wesley Jones Painting

My work moves on the premise that the world is essentially unknowable. Our sense of reality is an approximation. What we believe to be real is based on the best guess our brains can make about information our senses gather. Obviously, that information is quite limited. 

 

Memory and planning are processes in our minds that function in much the same way as dreams and hallucinations. As such, they have an easy susceptibility to manipulation.

 

Surrealism is the first thing people are typically reminded of when they see my work. But the work has a much closer relationship to the Byzantine and Romanesque periods of art, to my mind. The apparition of a center of control and order in the sky is the single most enduring idea in the human imagination. Like Jesus and Mohammed, I find that apparition an endless source of inspiration. 

 

But, like Goya’s relationship to witchcraft, I express the delusions not as a personal belief system. My view of Goya’s work is as an in-depth observation of the folly of human thought and behavior. I see my own observations in much the same way: a bearing of witness 

 

All painting is abstraction. Magritte’s The Treachery of Images settled the matter and now, at least to me, the point is obvious. Yet, when I taught that painting in Art History, adult students resisted: “of course it’s a pipe, can’t you see it?” The amount of discussion it took to help students realize a painting was line and shape and color hanging on a wall and not the actual object depicted tells us a great deal about our propensities. The artistic possibilities those propensities allow are the fertile ground of my practice.

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