Erik Jones was born in 1982 in a sunny beach community in St. Petersburg, Florida. He received a Bachelor of Arts at Ringling College of Art and Design in 2007.
After college, while working mainly as illustrator, Erik toured the US, showing his works at various pop-culture and art conventions. He gradually made his way to Brooklyn, New York, in 2009, where he currently lives. In New York, he also started exhibiting his works with Thinkspace Gallery. Since his mother proclaimed him as the next Picasso at a very young age, Erik has been creating outstanding pieces. His work now focuses on painting primarily for, but not limited to, galleries.
Erik’s work is vibrant and colorful, expressing a heightened sense of realism, captured in his female subjects, juxtaposed with sporadic mark making and nonrepresentational forms that could be said to mimic geometric high-end fashion. This effect is achieved by using multiple mediums such as watercolor, colored pencil, acrylic, water-soluble wax pastel and water-soluble oil on paper.
His technically complex mixed-media works combine the figurative with the geometric in seamless collusion and concert. Jones’ hyper-realistic figuration is offset by geometric patterns and momentums that seem to live and breathe as symbiotic organisms. The figure is ensconced by these colorful geometric expanses, as each “wears” the other and becomes virtually indivisible from its counterpart. Clothed by pattern and color, the body is set within and against expressionistic modules of sculpted graphic space.
Among his early influences there are pinup painters such as George Petty, Alberto Vargas, Gil Elvgren and other 1960’s illustrators who focused more on the female form, such as Coby Whitmore and Robert McGinnis.
While his style could be easily compared to comics, these last have never been a passion of Jones: only their bright colors and strong line quality have influenced his early work.
Jones’ portraits are dazzling celebrations exhibited with elegant bouquets of color dressing the figures within. The body of work may look like a dreamlike parallel universe but, as the artist himself states, his creations are not dreams; they exist in front of the viewer, placed on canvases and paper with skill and thoughtful reverie, as if looking at a real living being.
Jones’ futuristic view recognizes his portraits as conceptual fashion design; the shapes that dress the subjects are, indeed, living to suit the individual’s needs while maintaining their own beauty for themselves.
Jones has exhibited in seveal galleries including Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery, Thinkspace Gallery, Jonathan Levine Gallery, and had his first European solo show with Dorothy Circus Gallery in 2015.
