[Fay Jones'] artistic roots are in expressionism, surrealism and French modernism. Significantly, she has long credited Philip Guston with having an enormous influence on her as a painter.

Jones' work too, while representational, can be very abstract with its flattened volumes and surface patterning. Because of her high-spiritedness, Jones' pieces (unlike Guston's) are seldom melancholy, even when that's the underlying mood. The results are lively compositions whose decorativeness is given substance by their thought-provoking content. And her art can be very erotic, as demonstrated in this show by the exquisite Body Fires.

Much is made of the literary and dramatic sources of Jones' art. To me this is an overemphasis, which suggests that Jones' paintings are mere illustrations to received literary ideas or content. It ignores the fact that what the artist presents us with are the sensations and emotions evoked by subject matter but translated or condensed into the expressive manipulations of the medium. Like Matisse and others before her, Jones intuitively grasps the representational function of color and pattern. Make no mistake, Jones is a modernist in post-modern clothes.

There is no question that her paintings are often inspired by her personal life and the works of respected authors. She is a frustrated writer with a knack for making the intangible tangible, mixing autobiography with social commentary. The Art Student contemplates being a woman in a field dominated by men. In works like Touch and Go and Loss she can be very moving about birth and death. Jones' figures often have the look of mimes or Japanese Noh actors, infusing the work with drama and ritual.

As a painter, Jones is surrealist of the first order, conjuring up dream-like mysteries using imaginative imagery and juxtapositions, which invite a host of interpretations but rarely fully reveal themselves. She makes it easy to get distracted from her art's formal achievements and sucked into decoding it instead. As a result, viewers and interpreters alike have typically been engrossed with the narrative aspect of Jones' work, insisting they are stories or diaries or "prose poems."

But standing in front of her hypnotic Index (1989) with its Pop Art abstraction, compositional twists and shimmering surface I'm too dazzled to "read" it.

An important milestone in Jones' art is her consideration of collage, beginning in 1984. In this, Braque must have been a major influence, as he was a master of the medium. But Jones is also a natural for this art form given the dialogue she has traditionally carried on with works in progress. In this process, the painting "speaks" to her as it evolves, and compositional weaknesses or misdirections are responded to with new layers of paper and paint. She will even go so far as to reverse completed panels, as in Light Sleep (not a very narrative-driven move).

In 1984, Jones began using actual pages from literary texts in a series of book collages that record her own reading experiences and serve as a support for painted imagery. Excerpts from Lewis Carroll, Betty Friedan, even the pages of Reflex find their way literally into a number of Jones collages in the 1980's. It strikes me that the uniform, rectilinear blocks of verbiage, patched together at all angles, appeals to Jones visually as formal compositional devices in her art.

From this Jones moved to combinations of exotic and mundane decorative papers creating tapestries of special effects. In later pieces such as Balance and Loss she cut designs into or hole-punched the paper support, using the resulting paper dots as collage motifs in the paintings. These various collage techniques call attention to the surface reality of the work of art and represent an oriental-like assimilation of decorative and popular culture into fine art. The trend in Jones work in the 90's has been toward simpler forms and broader areas of color. This more recent work is particularly appealing, and further underscores her adherence to the formal tenets of modernism. The restrained 1996 Souvenir steals the show, which is not an easy call. No collage effects here, just acrylic and sumi ink. The black of the couple's hair, features and props jabs out at you against the muted grays and pastels, but it is a wonderfully unified piece. Jones' innate sense of design has never been better.

Excerpted from the article originally published in the 11/1/96 issue of AORTA. Reprinted with permission of the author and AORTA.

Chris Schnoor is a freelance art critic currently living in Boise, Idaho. He writes regularly for AORTA and the Boise Weekly.