"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
ABOVE:Colour Your Dreams (Springfield, Virginia: Capitol City Comics, 1972), front cover, by Jeffrey Jones.
ABOVE:Colour Your Dreams (Springfield, Virginia: Capitol City Comics, 1972), back cover, by Jeffrey Jones.
ABOVE: Jeffrey Jones, blue postcard, 5 x 8 inches.
ABOVE:Art Show: The Fantasy Art Monthly volume 1, number 2 (January-February 1978), with cover art by Jeffrey Jones.
ABOVE:The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love volume 2, number 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1972), with cover art by Jeffrey Jones.
No, I didn’t win that copy of Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love from an ebay auction, but I thought you might appreciate having a scan readily available to compare with the black-and-white original art that appeared on the cover of Art Show. As you can see, it was the fact that Jones’s original black-and-white artwork was mostly continuous tone that gave the Dark Mansions cover its striking appearance, which I’d characterize as somewhere between a typical comic book cover and a hand-coloured photograph.
JEFFREY JONES
71 WITTENBERG RD.
BEARSVILLE, NY 12409
Dear Mr. Weaver,
I’m sorry this took so long.
You asked about the proudest moments of my career. I don’t think I sit around and think about the past. There are artists who like to paint and those who like to have painted. I like to paint. I love to paint. The drawing, the way colors leap to life next to each other. I had a teacher once who said “There’s no such thing as an ugly color, it depends on what it’s next to.”
The first time I saw the following hand-written letter, it was for sale on ebay. Although I was sorely tempted, having been an admirer of Jones’s ongoing self-education and steady development as an artist since the early 1980s, when in my late teens I purchased in quick succession the three Dragon’s Dream books, The Studio,Yesterday’s Lily, and Idyl, I could not afford at the time to bid for it — or, at least, I didn’t feel like I could justify the expense to my wife — so I let it slip through my fingers. However, as a compensation of sorts, I saved the JPEG from the auction listing, so I could re-read it later for inspiration, because the fact is that I DID, for various personal and professional reasons I won’t go into here, find it tremendously inspiring. But then, somehow, I misplaced the JPEG when I moved all my e-stuff to a new computer, this computer, and the fact is, I thought at that point I would never get to read it again. And I was okay with that. I shrugged and moved on. It wasn’t that big a deal. But today is my lucky day, because here it is:
ABOVE: Jeffrey Jones, letter dated 7-20-73. From the collection of Rob Pistella. Note that the "underground comic" mentioned in the letter is the very one I posted a few days ago: Spasm!.
I think the line that really gets me is this: “With the Lampoon for instance I am free to do whatever I want with my page.” A single page of unconstrained artistic freedom every month: that’s the modest but essential standard by which Jeffrey Jones judged proposed projects in 1973, five hectic years into his career in commercial art.
Small things, even ill-favoured things, are treasure when they are truly one’s own.
———-
Thanks to Rob Pistella for inviting me to use scans from his CAF gallery on this blog. Rob has a terrific and growing collection of artwork (and ephemera!) by Jeffrey Jones, and I am delighted to be in a position to highlight some of those items here.
