Otis Jones | Blue Rectangle with Two Small White Rectangles, 2018

For several decades, the Dallas-based artist, Otis Jones, has joined the art of painting with a range of shaped, nearly sculptural formats. These are typically made of canvas secured to handcrafted wood structures that protrude from the wall more than standard paintings do. In this manner, his artwork belongs to a history of paintings as objects that were first created in the late 1950s and 60s by artists such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Donald Judd, the traditional format of a painting morphed into peculiar shapes that were radical and unprecedented. And with Jones in this lineage, one shape that he favors is the modified panorama. Perhaps inspired by the Southwest and having lived in the prairie lands of Kansas during his youth, the Lancaster sublime Otis Jones entitled Blue Rectangle with Two Small White Rectangles from 2018, is typical of his mature phase. This has mostly been expressed by small shapes placed on wide and narrow fields of color, as if figures on a landscape the geometric shapes are simply optical devices that is, they appeal to our perception and our eye’s ability to comprehend the entire picture. But as Jones has revealed, his works of art are life-driven things. His palette of colors could have been inspired by memories of a childhood spent at his grandfather's farm in Missouri, from the atmospheric light in New Mexico, a place that he loves, and from his appreciation for worn and muted surfaces. As one New York critic called Jone's contribution to contemporary art almost a miracle, what he meant is that it exudes a humanity often absent in pure abstraction. Otis Jones received an MFA in painting from the University of Oklahoma in Norman. Although a full-time artist, he has taught at TCU in Fort Worth and the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been exhibited in Dallas and Fort Worth for many years, and recently his paintings had been presented to a claim in Copenhagen, Zurich, Brussels and New York. I am Luanne McKinnon, author of Otis Jones, an illustrated monograph published in 2019.