PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
The Arts Council of Tuscaloosa
Contact: Kevin Ledgewood
pr@tuscarts.org
205-758-5195, x6
ARTIST ROGER JONES WILL BE FEATURED AT THE DINAH WASHINGTON CULTURAL ARTS CENTER IN OCTOBER
(Tuscaloosa, Ala.) Roger Jones will be the featured artist in The Arts Council Gallery at the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center Oct. 1-30, 2015. His exhibit of new paintings, titled “Every Night”, will include works based on musical themes. A reception honoring the artist will take place on Oct. 2 from 5-8 p.m. during First Friday.
Roger Jones is a Birmingham-based artist who was born in Tuscaloosa and raised in Selma, Ala. His drawings and paintings explore imagery concerned with architecture, nature, travel and music and have been exhibited in group shows in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. He graduated with a BA from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. in 2007 and The University of Alabama with an MFA in Painting in 2012. The artist’s work has been published in “American Artist Magazine” and “Studio Visit”. Jones is also a founding member of PaperWorkers Local, a non-profit artist co-op located in Birmingham, Ala. He has served as an art educator at The Montgomery Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art and The University of Alabama.
Jones currently works at Space One Eleven, a non-profit visual arts organization in Birmingham. When he is not drawing and painting in his studio, Jones can typically be found on the golf course or playing drums in bands around Birmingham. For more information about Jones and his work, visit rogerjones.yolasite.com.
Artist Statement
Music is an intensely visual phenomenon for me. When I listen to music, images of nature, objects, cities and places that I have only imagined combine and overlap, creating a kind of landscape in my mind. Through painting, I am clarifying the appearance of these images and making them perceptible to viewers. Each painting begins as a visual response to a song, album or memory of attending a concert. As each painting unfolds, the image assumes a life of its own, leading me in unexpected directions within the process of painting.
As a drummer, I have always been interested in the rhythmic qualities of songs. The repetition of sounds is essential to establishing a strong sense of rhythm and space within a piece of music. With the paintings in “Every Night”, pattern and repetition among colors and shapes are the means through which I create visual parallels to my experience of listening to and playing music.
Many of these paintings assume atmospheric qualities similar to those of a landscape painting through the buildup of thin transparent layers of paint. In other paintings, the pairing of overlapping bands of unmixed colors with the natural wood grain of the birch panels creates a more opaque and flattened, yet equally dynamic sense of space. These variations in how paint is applied to the canvases and wooden panels reflect my thought processes about how images resonate with the experience of listening to music.
Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-noon and 1-4 p.m. on weekdays and noon-8 p.m. on First Fridays.
The Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center is located at 620 Greensboro Avenue in Downtown Tuscaloosa. For more information about the CAC, The Arts Council or Bama Theatre, patrons should LIKE the Facebook page “The Arts Council-Bama Theatre-Cultural Arts Center” and follow tuscarts on Twitter. Call 205-758-5195 or visit cac.tuscarts.org for further information.
###