ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | OUTSIDER ART

Shields Landon (S.L) Jones

"The heads look as I feel, happy or sad - they aren't of anyone in particular but they come from me."-S.L. Jones

After the death of his first wife in 1969, wrestling with grief and lonliness after a 45-year marriage, S.L. Jones built a small workshop behind his house. There he picked up his two childhood hobbies: fiddle-playing and wood-carving. He began by taking small horses, rabbits and dogs to the county fair and proudly displaying the ribbons he won in the. As he gained confidence, he began to embellish his sculptures with paint, stain and penciling. His materials of choice were the native black maples, walnuts and yellow poplars growing around his West Virginia home.

Jones was one of thirteen children born into a family of sharecroppers in the West Virginia mountains. Hunting and music were the norm. To pass the time while hunting, he began carving small animals. Music was to be found at church, in the grange hall and at home. As an accomplished fiddle and banjo player, he won his first contest as a preteen.

In 1972, Jones married again and the couple moved into a new home complete with a workshed for Jones to work in. During this period, he began working on human busts and by 1975 he was carving full figure people. These works, measuring a few inches in height to life-size, during the seventies and eighties, he is best known for. Arching eyebrows, broad chins and the forced-looking smiles look at you. These homogenized features stand out whether the subject being depicted was male or female, someone he knew, his self-portrait or a character from his own imagination. They tended to be a step out of timewith hairstyles belonging to the early 20th century. The men wear overalls or suits with bowties and the women wear dresses. These works he would often start shaping with a chainsaw, moving to chisels and finishing with his whittling knife.

His drawings developed from his wood carving. One of the earliest, a painted mural of sheep, adorned the back wall of the shed where he spent much of his time after his first wife's death. He later drawings developed in the 80's and the vast majority of them were done in the 90's due to his deteriorating strength and coordination. He drew the same human and animal subject matter as he had carved in colored pencil, crayon, pastels, water-based paint and ball point pen. The horses, cows and dogs are always drawn in profile while the arch-browed, smiling people look out at the viewer. Having never stepped into an art museum or gallery, he invented space and conventions that made no reference to the mainstream artworld and were all his own