Ronald Jones.

Louisiana Life, Autumn 2002

Spirit and Sound

Ronald Jones' art with a beat

By John R. Kemp

The stage is lit by a single, shaded light bulb, hanging by a cord from the ceiling. Above the light shade, heavy clouds of smoke drift like an approaching summer storm. The music is jumping. The pianoman, with dark shades hiding his eyes, beats out a feverish riff. The drummer attacks the skins with his sticks, as the bass player kicks in the rhythm. An elegantly dressed young singer awaits her cue while the sax and trumpet players wail long, hot licks to a fever pitch. These soulful sounds are silent, imagined and suspended in paint, but New Orleans artist Ronald Jones hears and feels the music. His brush, paints and canvas are his keyboard, saxophone, drums, trumpet, bass and, most important, his voice. The painting is his "Spiritual Jazz."

From the gallery wall, other mood scenes and silent music play out from other paintings such as Groovin'," "Jazzin'," and "All Night Jazz." Jones creates his rhythmic jazzand blues paintings in a comfortable studio that fills the better part of an early 19th-centrury Creole cottage on North Rampart Street in New Orleans. By design or pure irony, the studio's windows and workspace overlook Armstrong Park and Congo Square, an evolutionary point of New Orleans music.

Here, on the back stage of the French Quarter, Jones explores his experiences and those of other black people in the urban and rural South, especially in New Orleans. His paintings are collective visual memories of New Orleans music halls, old women ironing clothes, country baptisms, mothers and children, boys playin basketball on a dirt lot, an old woman reading the Bible to eager listeners, or historic images of dancers and musicians on nearby Congo Square. His paintings pulsate with the vibrancy and energy of Caribbean and African art and with the rhyhms and soul of New Orleans the American South. They also reflect the artist's admiration for the work of earlier acclaimed black American artists such as Celementine Hunter, William Tolliver and Jacob Lawrence. From the looks of several paintings, Jones might have thrown Guaguin's name.

"Art is very spiritual to me," says the 50-year-old Georgia native. "It's not unusual for me to do paintings with spiritual themes." That spirituality is obvious in images of community baptisms in country creeks or bayous or in the old woman reading the Bible. In other paintings, that spirituality is subtly implied in music, the laboring farm workers and women ironing or in portraits of regal-looking African women.

Jones, a jazz saxophonist, composer and singer, was destined to be in New Orleans. Atlanta, where he had sold automobiles, wasn't the place to create his kind of art. That was immediately clear as soon as he arriived in New Orleans in the late 1980's to attend the wedding of his sister, Sandra Berry, who with husband Joshua, own and operate The Neighborhood Gallery at 1410 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. Jones now shows his work there.

The city's growing art scene and its endless visual and spiritual opportunities to create art were exactly what Jones was looking for. In 1988 he packed up his brushes and paints and moved to New Orleans, where he found a job at a local car dealership. But he was still caught between the two worlds of earning a living and following his dreams. Then in 1999 a providential layoff at the dealership helped him make the decision to become a full-time artist.

"New Orleans," he says, "provides me with a backdrop for what I want to do and love. It has given me a subject I can feel, I can hear, I can smell, I can interpret. It has afforded me the opportunity to pursue my dreams." The artist-businessman then adds: "It also has brought me to a place where the whole world comes to me. My clients come from other places."

Jones began paintings as a child back in Savannah, his hometown. His earliest works were those paint-by-number sets you could then buy at dime stores. He also enjoyed drawing in the dirt. With continued encouragement from his sister and mother, he worked at his art throughout his early life. "My Mother was an artist, but she became a nurse. When I showed some talent, she was very encouraging." To pass along that encouragement to others, Jones also teaches at-risk students part-time in the Jefferson Parish Public Schools. "I teach them how to channel their energies through the arts," he says.

Jones especially enjoys painting images of musicians playing jazz or the blues. His paintings have the soul, heart and rhythm of the music he caputres and the people who create it.

When the "spirit moves him," he visits local music clubs such as the Funky Butt, Donna's Bar, Snug Harbor, Sweet Lorraine's or even the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival to gather material and to let the music and performers speak to his imagination. "I'm hearing the music," he says. "Living in New Orleans, I'm exposed to this art form [jazz] at its highest level. It's very moving and allows you to express yourself as an artist. I don't do portraits of jazz musicians. I try to capture the spontaneity and essence of the musicians and music."

His painting "Spiritual Jazz" reminds him of jazz greats "Charlie Parker and Miles Davis or Billie Holiday playing a duet." In another painting, "Creole Café," we see a pink-jacketed piano player hunched over the keyboard, a drummer in the background, and a waitress walking by with a platter of shrimp balanced on one hand. Jones is adding a new ingredient to his jazz scenes – New Orleans seafood. "I want people to hear the sound, smell the food and feel the music."

Whether he's painting msuicians playing jazz or the blues, or baptism scenes in a country stream, Jones paints entirely from his imagination. "I put the elements together," he says, "and paint what I feel." He points to a baptism scene hanging on the gallery wall. "That could have taken place anywhere in the South." He rarely does preliminary sketches on location or at the clubs. He stores those images in his imagination. If a jam session was particularly hot or inspiring, he'll rush backto his studio to get the scene or feeling down on paper as a drawing or straight to the canvas. Though he paints in acrylcs, watercolors and pastels, he prefers oils. Oils give him the vibrancy he wants in a painting. "They always look like you just finished." He is like a composer with musical notes and rhythms dancing in his head eager to commit them to a musical score before they're pushed out by other tunes.

Fortunately for us, Jones' imagination is working well. He is producing a signifcant body of work that should secure him an important place in the New Orleans art world. He was the selected artist for the 1992 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage poster, and the New Orleans Museum of Art purchased his painting "Bible Study." Jones' imagery is strong and passionate whether he is depicting rural scenes or jazz. He has come a long way from his childhood in Savannah and art-school days at the University of Minnesota.

One midsummer afternoon, Jones' studio on North Rampart Street was filled with paintings in various stages of completion. Rough sketches waited on a worktable for further attention. The outline of a woman's head had been roughed in on a canvas that leaned against an outside wall. He was creating a new body of work for a show at The Neighborhood Gallery this fall. Meanwhile, a small group os sweat-flushed, pink-cheeked tourists, obviously from more northern climes, walked by the studio's two large front windows, peeked in through the glass door, mumbled something inaudible and moved on. Jones seemed undistracted. He welcomes the attention. Tourists, he says, are his best customers. They "pay the bills," which is why on weekend he operates an "outdoor gallery" on the corner of Royal Street and Orleans Avenue in the French Quarter.

Art is now his life. "I don't have a choice," he says in his soft, unassuming voice. "All my life I've wanted to live as an artist. I have to do as other artists of the past have done and forge a way to continue my life as an artist. I do it because it is a God-given talent, and I fill a void by creating my images. I know what it's like to be a starving artist. I take it one day at a time."

After a few moments discussing the things that move him most and his love of painting, his eyes scan the paintings hanging from the gallery walls as if watching moments in his own life. And then he adds in a voice slightly above a whisper. "My greatest paintings are still ahead."

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