Jeffrey Jones’ cover to The Dark Planet by J. Hunter Holly reveals an artist shrugging off her old methods in favour of a style rich in colour theory and a balance of immersive atmosphere and creative flair.
Book hunting for the lazy hunter
There used to be a time when second-hand bookstores seemed to be everywhere. You could barely stay upright for tripping over the things. Sadly, those days are gone and let’s face it, they’re probably never coming back. Just a cursory search for the second-hand bookstores I used to frequent as a youngling revealed that they are almost all gone. Almost of them. I bet if you did the same for wherever you hail from, you’ll find a similar result.
But all is not lost. Just most of it. What we have in place of those beautiful old stores is the mighty internet and the ability to search for a book on the shelves of thousands of bookstores and collections at once with a few clacks of a keyboard. This will never, ever, beat the sensation of walking into an old bookstore and smelling the history, and possibilities, found within, but goodness gracious me does it make it a whole lot easier to find books you want!
I have a very distinct memory of walking into a second-hand bookstore called Sainsbury’s Books on Lygon Street in Melbourne in the year 2000. It was one of those great bookstores that was just crammed full of books and every wall was covered with them. Upstairs, in a tiny little room, the Sci-Fi and Fantasy section could be found. Armed with my list of Jeffrey Catherine Jones and Frank Frazetta paperback covers (organised by author, then title) I proceeded to go through those shelves of books with the precision of a surgeon. The thought of missing a book was almost too awful to contemplate!
I remember coming back down the stairs with a handful of titles and joy in my heart. This was one of those books:
When you’re not a Sci-Fi kinda guy
I’ve never been a big reader of Sci-Fi. I wouldn’t even call myself a small reader of that genre. Give me a hero with a sword in their hand and a ravenous horde of enemies in front of them and you’ve got my undivided attention. But you know what? I read this one. That’s one of the great things about those old books: they’re short! So I read this one. And I honestly couldn’t tell you anything about it now. There was definitely a guy in it. And I think he had to travel somewhere in space to do a thing to save Earth… There were a lot of books that followed this plot back then. There’s even a bunch of similar ones with Jeffrey Catherine Jones covers on them too.
So, I did a thing I’m not necessarily proud of, but I can see why I did it. I cut the cover off the book.
My thinking was, ‘Hey, I’ve read the book, but all I want now is the Jones cover. And this way, I’ll save some space on my shelves for even more books!’
Now, I’m not saying that the regret was instantaneous, but it did creep in slowly. Today, well, I could slap that younger me. Slap him real hard. Especially because I went on to cut the cover off many more books after this one. I have a big pile of them now. Each cover has been given a layer of protection in the form of Book Cover Film (or Contact, as we call it in Australia) and they sit in a slipcase next to some of the Frazetta and Jones books I thankfully haven’t been so ruthlessly wicked to.
Beacuse I can’t go back in time to stop that younger me being so ridiculously stupid, I’m on a mission to reclaim those books I butchered. It’s going to take some time and more money than a person should be spending on old books, but I’m determined to reclaim that library of intact books I once had. And this is the first one I can tick off that list:
Jeffrey Catherine Jones & the art of light and texture
Here is the art for that cover. The orignial Acrylic painting sold at Heritage Auctions in 2023 for a sum of $5,250. What a steal!
The more I look at this piece, the more I love it. While it’s a fairly simple painting on the surface, there are a few surprises to be found once you start to scratch at that same surface a little.
What first jumps out at me is the classic use of complementary colours. The painting has a dominant blue colour to it, with splashes of orange and gold for contrast. If you take a look at a colour wheel, you’ll find these two colours are on opposing sides of it. In colour theory terms, this makes these two colours complementary. Blue and orange are even one of the more exemplary complementary combinations, with maximum contrast for impact.
From a storytelling perspective, this piece is very Jones. If you look at it at face value, we find a young male wearing a pair of orange pants with an almost Art Nouveau Science Fiction design on them. The figure has his arm raised, appearing to be hailing a gigantic orange spacecraft that hovers over a ridge of snowy mountains in the distance.
I mean, it looks quite chilly, doesn’t it? It might even be a bright winter’s day. Wear a sweater, chap! And do you think the beings in the space ship that somewhat resembles a dog’s rubber chew toy are going to see you? They’re probably a good one hundred kilometres away!
Thankfully, the believability of the scene, and a certain lack thereof, matters not. You could almost say that in spite of this, the painting appeals all the more. This is early Science Fiction after all, where the laws of plausibility, in both stories and art, were stretched well beyond breaking point. Seen through a healthy dose of nostalgia and ‘knowing forgiveness’ for a work done without the benefit of modern advances, pieces like this have an appeal unto their own.
‘That’s what art is, everything put together.’
– Jeffrey Catherine Jones
Look beyond the retro spacecraft and other trappings of the time and you see a figure that is wonderfully portrayed. See the tricep on the figure’s left arm, the way the small of his back is rendered. The way light picks up strands of his hair. Speaking of the hair, I’d bet a spaceship that this figure is Jones herself. She posed for a great deal of her own cover figures around that time, and I believe this is to be one of them.
Air
Jones had a way of creating atmosphere that most other artists could only dream of. Even back in the late 60’s and early 70’s when she was pumping out a cover painting a week, she knew how to put air in a painting. It’s a strange concept to wrap your head around, putting air into a painting, and probably really difficult to define, but what I think Jones meant was that to give a painting air, it needs to be more than just a layer of paint on a piece of illustration board. You need to feel the world depicted on it. You need to imagine you can walk around in it.
Look, I told you it would be difficult to define!
Studying The Dark Planet painting, I think Jones succeeded in giving it that air in the atmosphere she depicted. You can almost feel the wind breaking over the line of mountains like a freezing wave. The distance to the spacecraft feels far, aided by the way Jones has faded it into the sky in parts.
The mountains are a jagged contrast of shadow and light. There are no trails, no details at all beyond the contours basking in golden light. The mountains are a wall, a barrier that stands between the figure and the giant ship. Even if the figure somehow had a way of getting to the ship, the walls stand harsh and protective.
Figuring It Out
To my mind, this painting represents JCJ beginning to really master not only paint as a tool in itself, but how it can be applied to a figure with not only accuracy, but style. For something as complex as the figure, you can’t really convincingly inject your own personal style into it without having a thorough understanding and skill in both the technical and experimental aspects of it.
Let me put it another way. Imagine you’re learning a new language in the hope of being able to write a poem in it one day. You could certainly try and go straight to writing the poem after a week of learning the language, sure. But you would get a far better result if you waited and learned the entire language and the nuances inherently found in it. Only then can you apply both your understanding of the language AND insert some of your own natural flair into it.
The Dark Planet is Jeffrey Catherine Jones starting to really do that. No longer bound by the constraints of her early minimalist palette, she applied colour with confidence:
And style. Look at the inclusion of blue in the flesh here. This is a technique often used by painters to create a relationship between one element or another, especially foreground and background objects. While it is a practical technique, Jones did it with strokes that only Jones could produce. You could look at just that shoulder section and tell that it was painted by her.
Like the language analogy I used, this painting is speaking. More than that, with the brushtrokes, the colour choices, the composition, the injected air, Jones is speaking to us. She is telling us she just about ready for the next phase of her artistic life, where colour and atmosphere will rule supreme. You can see it in the gesture of the hand. It’s there in the coiling of the back muscles. You can see it, so very clearly, in the space around the figure.
Closing
I look at this painting and I don’t see a figure waving at a distant spaceship. I see Jones herself, waving at her future artistic growth. The tilt of her form suggests an eagerness to hop on board that ship and see where it takes her. I think that journey meant more to her than any single painting or paycheque ever possibly could.
Jeffrey Catherine Jones was a pure artist and the journey was everything.
Be sure to check out my post on the Jeffrey Jones Series 1 Trading Cards!
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