Benjamin JONES
For more than 40 years, Tybee Island based artist Benjamin Jones has created haunting images that reveal his distinct visual language. Inhabiting an intriguing, indefinable space, each poignant portrait reveals the artist’s innermost feelings and insecurities, while touching a familiar place in all of us.
Mixing whimsy with horror, humor with malevolence, Jones’ figures send messages about the struggle of life and all its paradoxes. These seductive and intimate drawings, paradoxical in themselves, create a tension between the purity of their intuition and the refinement of their presentation.
As a keen observer of current events, Jones keeps intricate journals, day and night, collecting images clipped from newspapers, or gathered from his travels that become source material for his drawings. But, in the end, Jones chooses an isolated life, carefully guarding his time and energy for art making.
Born in Atlanta in 1954, Jones received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the State University of West Georgia. Seven pieces by Jones are included in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other museums that have collected Jones’ work include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA; and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA.
Jones received a 1994 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Southern Arts Federation. In 2004 he was awarded a grant from the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in New York. Jones is the only artist in Georgia since 1979 to receive the honor.
