FRANK JONES

 

FRANK JONES              The complex colored-pencil line drawings of Frank Jones, are the brilliantly creative by-product of a troubled life.  In these drawings, Jones developed an endless yet mesmerizing pattern rendering highly stylized, architectural, two-dimensional structures.  The obsessive-compulsive lines of these buildings were orchestrated without symmetrical predictability.  Every exterior and interior wall was an elaborately embellished line (he preferred working with the contrasting colors of blue and red, and on occasion, he introduced the color green).  In a number of his unique constructs, Jones would include a clock.  More fascinating than the purely imaginative lines segmenting the house-like structures, however, are the inclusion of strangely cute, smiling creatures resembling cartoon bugs to which he gave the label of “haints”.   “Haints” (also “winged devils”, “grand-daddy”, and “Humpty-Dumpty devils”) were nothing more than your common, everyday garden variety of evil spirits which come to visit you and mess up your day when you least expect it to happen.  These incredibly inventive yet charming looking entities were controllable, according to Jones, by capturing them and putting them in his “houses”.  There, they would not have the power over a person that they might normally have.  Though playful in appearance to the outside world, the “haints” which occupy the interiors of Jones’ rooms, were the symbolical representation of the havoc which must have racked the innermost fabric of the artist’s sense of well-being.                Frank Jones signed each of his drawings, not with his name, but with his prison number, 114591.  Born to parents who both abandoned him at an early age, that he had a caul over one eye during his birth, gives additional significance to his ability to “see” or to interpret the intentions of the spirit-filled world later in his hard luck proned life.  Without any formal education, he went on to work in a series of makeshift jobs throughout young adulthood and eventually became the “victim” of unfortunate circumstantial criminal charges for which he was imprisoned the rest of his life.  It was in prison that Jones believed he was visited nightly by the ghosts (“haints”) which inhabit his drawings.               Frank Jones’ drawings are far more than the product of a naïve or an innocent uneducated person scribbling on pieces of paper for mere entertainment.  They are the dramatic result of a particularly insightful talent which, because of their invention, gives the viewing public, who often cannot see beyond the visual representation of houses and friendly cartoon characters, the opportunity to examine the “demons” which haunt and, indeed, shape the nature of who we are and are kept housed….deep inside.