Mark Jones was born in Saratoga Springs, NY in 1950. His formative years as an artist were spent in Amsterdam and New York City. He studied at the Rijks Museum School in Amsterdam, and the Art Students League in New York. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Brooklyn College where he studied with Philip Pearlstein.
His work has been widely exhibited over the past forty years in museums and commercial galleries throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He taught painting and photography at Hobart and William Smith Colleges from 1985 until 2015.
Jim Crenner, poet, critic and Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges writes in the catalogue to Jones’ 2015 retrospective exhibition:
A confounding blend of masterful technique, transformative voodoo, and unqualified love for the way things look—that’s what I find in the extraordinary paintings of Mark Jones. Find, revere, and am dumbfounded by. What we say we get from looking at works of art is aesthetic pleasure, but just what or what all is meant by that? Certainly it ought not to be taken as limited to matters of form. The pleasures to be found in looking at the art of Mark Jones are many and diverse, and have as much to do with ideas about light, beauty, personality, meaning, identity, our relationship to animals and even to “reality” itself, as they do with the formal properties of a work. But note too that the formal properties and painterly skills evident here are genuinely thrilling. The artist in Mark, like the perceiving eye in Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snowman” is one who
beholds
Nothing that is not there and the
Nothing that is.
Not to mention, the Everything that is.