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Chuck Jones
UNITED STATES
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“Chuck Jones, PhD, is a Knoxville, Tennessee, USA-based, primarily self-trained artist with a long adjacent career in Clinical Psychology.”
Some French friends, Francoise Davoine and the late Jean-Max Gaudilliere, wrote a harrowing but profound book titled, History Beyond Trauma, offering a subtitle spun off from while correcting Wittgenstein (they weren’t short on chutzpah): “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent,” they said. It’s a play on the idea there is much outside our internal awareness driving our lives; some of it incessantly shaping our path despite being consciously unknown; something that insists on being recognized despite our desire to ignore and even disown it.
Icon | Acrylic
NFS
While conceptualizing my own way to think about abstraction, I hit on the idea of holding two incompatible ideas in my mind to see what synthesis might emerge through paint on my paper. In this case, the prompts were simplicity and complexity. The social context: A pandemic, political and social upheaval, John Lewis’ death. Powerfully moved as I listened to his funeral, this is the image that emerged.
It hangs in my living room.
In keeping with their wisdom, I paint from the foundational question, “What wants to be said.” Or similarly but slightly differently stated, “What wants to reveal itself?” This pursuit sounds easier than it is but, nonetheless, I’m trying to describe a very powerful artistic navigating tool. If you can hang in there, let me explain a bit more.
As Simple As Possible …. But No Simpler | Acrylic
$4,100
Shortly after Icon and the task of balancing simplicity with complexity during our current upheaval, I added a refinement, nodding to Einstein who suggested: Make everything as simple as possible….but no simpler.
So, I did.
The black tower is simple and precise. It tapers to nothing –a pixel wide line in Photoshop. It’s carefully conceived and implemented.
The amorphous red isn’t. My oxymoronic joke: It exemplifies stochastic intentionality - deliberate randomness.
The world in a nutshell
A long time ago – during my mid 20’s as I recall – while struggling to figure out the point to my existing, I had one of those in-the-shower epiphanies. My realization: I’m alive as a means for the Universe to perceive itself. It’s an odd species of orienting-to-find-meaning idea that still rings true for me a half a century later.
“As a clinical psychologist, I had to learn to listen to myself in exactly the way I’m describing in order to help others understand what they were experiencing.”
At this point in life, though, I would add a corollary: Perceiving, for me, requires carefully articulating the intricacies of my experience, whether putting some perception into language or into visual expression. Either form – generating an adequately aligned pattern in words or in paint – requires a thoughtful effort to assure as precise a resonance as I can clarify between my internal experience and my external expression. You see, I’m seeking to match the word or paint pattern with what Eugene Gendlin calls my felt sense, that visceral registry providing an as-yet unacknowledged precursor informing communication. It’s quite idiosyncratically personal.
An Apposition of Oppositions | Acrylic
$4,100
The original title was Yin and Yang: Our Social Complexity. It has been invited to two international exhibitions.
I modified the title after reflecting on what I was trying to juxtapose: The tensions comprising our current social upheaval. It’s the very similarities and dissimilarities fueling our human imbalances that could, instead, if embraced, fuel a much richer culture of social complementarity.
But we are rather silly creatures.
This derived from a G. Spencer Brown book in the Sixties; one I didn’t understand that profoundly affect me. His words:
“… a distinction is drawn by arranging a boundary with separate sides so that a point on one side cannot reach the other side without crossing the boundary….Once a distinction is drawn, the spaces, states, or contents on each side of the boundary, being distinct, can be indicated.”
I painted such a distinction. And 50 more.
This one is in a London international exhibit.
Drawing Distinctions | Acrylic
$4,100
For example, I might ask myself, “Am I painting something about anxiety?” And, by checking internally, I recognize that’s not quite accurate. The sense I’m trying to speak from is more like, “I’m painting something about restless excitement.” Differences like that matter. Because noticing such nuances leads to next levels of refinement both in comprehension and in expression of what’s comprehended. It’s a Goldilocks Determination of sorts. You know: Is it too big? Too small? Or JUST RIGHT? On target. That’s it. Or differently, it’s like that kids’ guessing game we used to play: Colder? Warmer? Burning hot. Spot on!
“I spend my days listening to myself in interaction with the paint and the associated words as they both arise to see what I can understand about what I’m experiencing.”
“The resonance among the words, the paint, and the felt sense to reveal unexpected foreign territory as I home in on what was trying to get itself noticed.”
This differentiating process is not easy. It requires practice at paying very close attention and, weirdly, practice always initially assuming that whatever I think is going on isn’t quite the more fundamental version I’ll find if I just patiently sit with my internal sense, dig a little deeper, check with what gradually emerges, and allow whatever surfaces to surprise me.
Centrifugal | Acrylic
Sold
Camelback Exhibition Bronze Award.
A 14th Century Pope sought a painter for St. Peters. Giotto was invited to audition. He took a canvas, dipped his brush in red pigment, painted a perfect circle. Grinning, he offered, “Here’s your drawing.” The envoy scoffed but took it to the Vatican. Giotto was recognized and hired.
Having paper, a flat vertical surface, brushes with black and white paint, I tried to channel my best Giotto.
I particularly enjoy its imperfections.
Yet again, put differently, the signifier (word or paint) is not the meaning. It merely points toward a potential recognition of meaning. One must inhabit the exchange to grasp what’s being pointed to. And that’s challenging. Even though it’s profoundly important. Without listening deeply, we may think we understand but there is no way we can.
Transitions | Acrylic
$4,100
The gestural intent behind this piece seeks to capture a quality of kinetic tension between contrasts.
There are two interesting, relevant stories I cannot fit into my 500-character restriction, but I’ll tell you if you contact me.
Transitions occur from top to bottom, from solid to spattered, from careful to more carefree, from white to black and back again on all levels.
This one was in two recent exhibits: Gray Cube Gallery and The Holy Art Gallery in London, England.
During the Summer of 2020, while wondering about this version of art we call abstract painting, it occurred to me that one approach to generating such work could involve holding two incompatible ideas in my head, simultaneously. The point is to see what two seemingly dissimilar constructs might end up having in common when juxtaposed against one another to see what emerges. Like weighing simplicity against complexity. The aim isn’t so much to resolve the tension as to sit with and let it inform some next step in comprehending.
This was a painting about the structure provided by framing as contrasted to the more spontaneously emergence of, well, spontaneous occurrences. Frames organize, restrict, reveal, contextualize what’s within.
One day, I noticed Max, my 7-month-old Cairn Terrier puppy (think: Toto) eating the corner off my painting.
So, Max reframed my concept with unrestrained puppy spontaneity, a performance feature, unconstrained by the limits of the painting medium.
Max photo provided on request.
The Dog Ate My Painting | Acrylic
$4,100
“Jones has had more than 30 pieces in national and international exhibits over the last couple of years.”
The Fault Line | Acrylic
$4,100
I’m playing, here, with the jagged edge of distinction, where I wanted the demarcation to have a kind of weight conveyed by the impact of deep black against the bright red. It’s sharp enough one could cut oneself.
And, I’m thinking of Fault broadly, from shifting tectonic plates to Michael Balint’s psychoanalytic version of the Basic Fault, based on how past trauma shapes current experience and function – for individuals or for social groups.
One series that surfaced involved thin, spiralling gestures – a bit like a pirouetting Calla Lily, if I was forced to describe it concretely. I made probably a couple hundred of them. Sometimes they worked, often they didn’t. They are very delicate (look at Icon). The unfolding context in which I was exploring this tension is important, too, because it provides the backdrop of collected emotion-shaping exemplars: the Covid-19 pandemic disrupting our world, George Floyd’s death and the Black-Lives-Matter demonstrations, our massive political upheaval, and the accompanying idea of ‘Alternate Facts. And more. And then John Lewis died, an event that I found deeply moving.
This contrasts with a more peaceful circular version, Centrifugal, above. And provides more of a basic central tendency than the meandering version, Tangled in the Darkness, below.
Time has passed since both. And current impinging forces are more stirred up and far flung; less coherent; more contrasting.
There's singularity of strands and unity of sentiment, yet a propulsion outward.
There's blending and mixing and the starkness of distinction; a lack of resolution.
It’s all intensional
Will Our Circle Be Unbroken? | Acrylic
$4,100
Again, the undergirding assignment: Seeking simplicity in all of this unfathomable social complexity. And, while listening to this icon’s funeral – something I wouldn’t normally do – and painting and holding all this material in my mind, Icon, the first painting in this solo exhibit emerged. The gesture perfectly captures the complexity of all that I was experiencing in a simple, elegant movement. It’s an outcome that’s far more than the sum of the parts swirling around within me but, at the same time, it strikes me as an accurate visual testament to all of that inchoate swirling.
Tangled in the Darkness | Acrylic
$4,100
I’ve painted some colorful versions of this motif, but in this case I’m using the black rather literally to depict the darkness through which we are all trying to find a pathway toward something more satisfying. A shared night-hood of the soul that has become our interwoven trajectory of a destiny we cannot yet see.
“I guess I’m seeking to generate my own language, in interaction with the universe, to discuss art… and everything else.”
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