About the artist
1901–1997, lived and worked in Hinton, West Virginia
Shields Langdon "S. L." Jones was something of an Appalachian Renaissance man, distinguishing himself for his widely collected and admired sculptural and two-dimensional art as well as for his virtuosic musicianship. Born in rugged, mountainous Indian Mills, West Virginia, he hunted, trapped, and whittled wood with a bowie knife as a young boy when he wasn’t helping his father, a tenant farmer and lumberjack. For much of his life, Jones worked for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company, a major employer in John Henry country. He lied about his age in 1918 in order to be hired as a track layer, and he retired in 1967 as a foreman. After his retirement and the death of his first wife, Jones was able to concentrate on his music—he was renowned in the region as a superb fiddler and banjoist—and his boyhood hobby of carving. Influential folk art curator and collector Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. encountered Jones’s droll wood sculptures at a Charleston, West Virginia exhibition in 1972. Hemphill helped to promote the artist, whose work now resides in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum and the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, as well as in private collections throughout the United States.
Jones’s masterful early knife carvings of local yellow poplar, walnut, and maple started as small-scale, unadorned animal and human figures. By the late 1960s, these miniatures had morphed into full-size portrait busts and figures depicting real-life neighbors and imagined subjects alike, all executed with chisels. Jones’s standardized and stylized heads rank among his most celebrated works––his uncanny knack for capturing personal details transforms deceptively simple pieces into evocative and often humorous sculptural works. In the early 1970s, Jones began to employ various paints, stains, and other surface treatments which greatly increased the verisimilitude of his busts. His polychromed portrait sculptures, with the so-called “archaic smile” characteristic of ancient Greek kore statues, embody what many consider to be the apex of his sculptural achievement. After suffering a stroke later in life, Jones turned increasingly to intimate drawings in graphite, ink, and pastels, with subjects closely related to those he carved. Portraits, animals (especially horses), and musicians, with some additional landscape elements, recur in his sensitively colored, still smiling late-period drawings.
—Brendan Greaves
Bibliography
Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
Contemporary American Folk, Naïve, and Outsider Art: Into the Mainstream? Oxford, OH: Miami University Art Museum, 1990.
Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.
Transmitters: The Isolate Artist in America. Philadelphia: Philadelphia College of Art, 1981.
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995.