GORDON JONES

“I paint mainly landscapes, and these are often landscapes of the mind — what Corot called ‘souvenirs.’ He meant freewheeling remembrances, not snapshots to take home from a vacation. Many of my remembrances have, indeed, settings perhaps best forgotten — times of grim weather, of cloggy mud and wet feet, of ruined and rutted roads. The early spring melt is the season I love best. I love the brave way last year’s yellow-orange grass smirks through the first streaks in the melt. — and I love too the later stage which Tennyson knew so well: “Now fades the last long streak of snow.” Then again, I love water, liquid or frozen — oceans and puddles, ponds and lakes — and the reflections we find in the depths of its surface. They are often our own reflections, of course, and I don’t mean of the kind favored by Narcissus. I mean rather the capacity of the settled or turbid surface of water to bring us to our own depths.”