Carroll N. Jones Jr.
1917-2009
Obituary posted: Thursday, July 9, 2009 12:00 am | Updated: 2:59 pm, Thu May 20, 2010.
By Marina Knight
Editor’s note: Marina Knight of the Stowe Reporter staff profiled artist Carroll Jones in October 2006. Here are excerpts from that article.
Carroll Jones doesn’t remember life without art.
Since the ripe age of 5, probably even before then, he’s been sketching and painting his way through life. First, it was as a schoolboy tagging alongside his uncle, a well-known landscape painter in Connecticut. Then it was as an enthusiastic high schooler painting a mural for the teachers’ lunchroom. Next came Yale, a degree in fine arts, and service in the Army, where Jones became known as a talented artist and medical illustrator.
From there, his career soared along and now, nine decades later, it has not yet ended.
The body of his work, on display at the Art Gallery in Stowe, is an amazing trip through Jones’s life. It tells of how an inspired and impassioned young man went out into the world and made it his own.
Dozens of Jones’ paintings, sketches, medical illustrations, portraits, commercial work and fine art trace the threads of a richly woven life, and show his broad range of talent and technical mastery akin to Renaissance greats.
The biggest gem of the show, however, is Jones himself. If you’re lucky, he’ll be there to shed light on and enliven his work for you in person when you visit the gallery on Main Street.
The comprehensive collection was pulled together with the help of friends and family. Lillian Zuber, a close friend of Jones, a fellow artist and owner of the Art Gallery, was the chief orchestrator of the show. She has been dreaming of hosting a retrospective of his work for some time now. The two met in New Jersey 45 years ago and have been close friends ever since.
A few years ago, after Jones’s wife died, he came to live with Zuber and her husband, Walt, in Stowe, where they continue to paint with a handful of other artists in the area.
“I thought it was about time for people to know who he was,” Zuber said. “He’s going to be 90 in January, and he’s had a long and diverse career.”
The front room of the gallery includes the bulk of Jones’s most impressive works. Several original paintings from work published by Life Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and Old Crow bourbon hang on the walls, along with some of their preparatory sketches. There are also recent sketches of Abraham Lincoln, some early paintings from Yale, a commissioned work by the Kirby family of Charleston, S.C., and a collection of other work on a table in the middle of the room, including art Jones did for various book covers.
Jones’s personal favorite, an original oil depicting the storming of the Winter Palace during the Russian Revolution in 1917, sits on an easel in the corner.
“What I like best about it is the quality of light,” Jones said, running his fingers across the canvas.
The process he went through to create it and most other paintings he did for Life was thorough, to say the least. While Jones was working on the Epic of Man series, for example, he and other members of the editorial staff attended conferences with archaeologists such as Louis Leakey and Dr. Carlton Coon.
“We would all get together for one big meeting and hear what the experts had to say,” Jones said.
He explained that the artists tried to glean who had the most solid theory and research on which to base their drawings, and were assigned a secretary who helped them with their research.
For the Russian Revolution painting, Jones wanted to be sure to capture the action as well as the feel of the place during the assault. During an interview with someone who had been there during the battle, and through photographs of the palace before it was stormed, Jones found that the only light to come in the palace was from the rotating strobe on the battleship Potemkin outside.
Jones’s painting depicts the scene just so. The composition is busy, with dozens of figures attacking one another on the ground floor and up the elegant staircase. To the right, figures sway back and right while motion in the other half of the painting moves left, which heightens the sense of drama.
The palace’s ornate interior is lit by the Potemkin’s strobe, which comes in from the left of the painting through tall French doors, illuminating columns and fancy glass chandeliers.
For Jones’s Epic of Man series, Life sent him to Lebanon and Syria to study art and artifacts. He went to the port of Tyre, traveled up in a plane to take pictures, then spent three weeks in the basement of the Louvre in Paris doing research on Phoenician culture.
When Jones got back to the studio in New York, he had a catalog of photographs to help compose his work with detailed accuracy. All the intricacies seen in the print (also in the gallery’s main room) make it a convincing representation of the culture at its apex in 500 B.C.
Here we turn the clocks back to when Jones was stationed in California as a Yale graduate in the Army. He suffered a bad knee injury while climbing in the mountains, but through the accident he was introduced to a brilliant orthopedic surgeon, who later asked him to do the medical illustrations for his book on amputation.
“That’s just a phase I went through. In this business, one thing leads to another,” Jones said.
After Jones got out of the Army, he went off to New York with a portfolio of portraits he had done for high-ranking military officials, medical drawings and a series of 16 studies of President Abraham Lincoln. But the portfolio was stolen at the first advertising agency he went to, looking for work.
In the past several months, Jones has been rebuilding his stolen Lincoln series from photographs taken by presidential photographer Mathew Brady. A handful of sketches hang in the main gallery room.
“He has one of the strongest and most interesting faces, and you can see how it changed over the course of years,” Jones said.
Also in the show are a dozen or so impressive commissioned portraits, paintings from around Stowe, a series of polo players, paintings from Jones’s Old Crow bourbon ads, and even a tiny painting tucked way off in a remote corner that he did — well, he’s not quite sure when — of Lady Godiva.
Looking back, Jones said the approach he took throughout his career was simple and it began with a true love of drawing.
“When I was little and my mother first took me to kindergarten, I didn’t like the idea of school and so I was crying,” Jones said. “Before my mother left, she told the teacher I like to draw. So, my mother left and the teacher sat me down with some paper. She held up a banana and asked me to draw it.”
So he did. He used yellows and browns and even drew the small rotten spot on the banana held in front of him.
“The teacher was so proud. I knew right then and there that I would be an artist. It’s funny how such a little thing had a great deal to do with it,” Jones said.
That was the beginning, and his career has flown, literally, from that point continuously to the present.
“When I saw something someone was doing and I liked it, I went to see them about it. I’ve been very fortunate to be a part of it and to have the people around me that I did,” Jones said.
