The Artistic Style of Jeffrey Jones
This was conducted in early 1987, though I did not make note of the exact date. It was published in the CFA-APA issue # 8 with a March 1987 cover date.
Todd I wanted to start by getting some background information on you. Where were you born?
Jeff I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. I was an Air Force brat so we lived awhile in Puerto Rico and awhile in Denver. I started school in Avondale, a suburb of Atlanta, and picked it back up in Puerto Rico. We came back to Decatur, GA and I lived there until I was 22.
T My wife commented the other day that you don’t have an accent from that area.
J A number of people have said I don’t have an accent, and I don’t know what happened to it. I guess I never had one, except in times of stress I would revert to ' foht-teen, seben, eleben, fyoonyal ' etc.
T When you were younger were you aware of the fantasy field?
J I wasn’t even aware of the fantasy field until I was 19.
T Really? And how old were you when you started to draw?
J I don’t think I was any different from most kids. Kids draw before they go to school, and I drew just like any other kid. I think it was not until I was 13 when I started to be aware that I was drawing more than everyone else, and then I just dropped it. I drew for about a year when I was 13 and I dropped it and didn’t pick up a pencil to draw again until I was in high school. I guess I was 17, when I met a guy, BB Sams, an artistic genius in drawing. He was my second great influence, the first being N. C. Wyeth.
T What got you interested in it again?
J A friend of mine. I met a guy in high school who drew all the time, and it inspired me and made me remember that I liked to draw. So I picked up a pencil and started drawing again. He and I would compare drawings and show each other what we’d done. A kind of inspiration for each of us to continue.
T When did you realize that you wanted to do this as a way of life?
J Oh, it was still a few years away. I went into college majoring in Geology and then I changed that to Physics, and I was in school for about a year and a half before I realized that what I really wanted to do was draw. I found myself, as time went on, doing less homework and more drawing. So I switched schools and started majoring in art. I guess I was about 19 then.
T I’ve seen ads from people selling prints that I believe were done by you in college. Were you putting things out that early?
J I’m unaware of that. There were no prints done while I was in college. I did a little bit of fanzine stuff I guess, while I was in college. By this I mean mimeograph stuff and a few pen & ink things, maybe a color piece, but there weren’t any prints that I’m aware of that were published in the pages of fanzines.
T Maybe they were originals that someone got hold of?
J They could be something that was done later unless I’ve forgotten. I don’t know what that was.
T What was your first professional job?
J My first professional job was a cover for Ace books. It was a Jack Vance book called ‘City of the Chasch’.
T From the people I’ve talked to I understand the paperback cover field is hard to get into. How did you get started in it?
J I know how it happened. I don’t know why it happened. From time to time it’s easier to get into. It kind of goes in cycles depending on what’s being done. When I got into it there was a lot of cover art being done. Right now it’s a lot of type. At the time, early ’67, I think I did that cover in March of ’67, the editor of Ace Books, Donald Wollheim had seen my work at a convention the year before in Cleveland, and when I went up to Ace Books he remembered me and he remembered my work, and I’m not sure how much say he had in buying cover art. I know it was generally the art director’s job, but I think the science fiction books he had some say in at the time. So I think it was probably through him that got me my first work at Ace.
T Were you doing more work for the paperback covers or fanzines and comics at the time? I know you haven’t done that much comic work.
J The first job I did was a story I started called ‘Dragonslayer’ which was in ‘Witzend’. That was, I assume, a non-professional job because I wasn’t paid for it. I started that right before I moved to New York. Then the Ace book was the first professional job I did. After the Ace job I got a comic job at Warren. Archie Goodwin was editor then, and he wrote a story for me called ‘Angel of Doom’, and that was my first comic book story done in 1967.
Editor’s Note. "Dragon Slayer" appeared in Larry Ivie's Monsters & Heroes #2. Thanks to Ronn Sutton for the correction.
T Did the paperback jobs pay better than say a whole comic story?
J Well see, I never did a whole comic job. I did short stories in comics and single pages up to maybe 10 pages. And it was still a page rate then. The pay on everything was very low in those days. It’s hard to equate the time that was put into a comic job and the time that was put into a cover and whether one paid more than the other. It’s difficult because neither one were paying very much then.
T Did you keep the original paintings?
J I fought to keep the originals from the very beginning. In those days no one was keeping originals or the rights. It was a situation before the generation of illustrators who are working now, the generation of illustrators who were working then had no interest in keeping the originals. There weren’t the sub-cultures that bought originals. They were doing it as a profession. It was a job, and there were few people around at the time wanting the originals back. It took a couple of years there before I began to get them back. What happened was I was still doing a lot of work for Ace Books and I went into the office one day and the art director showed me a transparency that had been done for a detective novel, and it was a photographic set up. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something like a hat and a gun, and a vase with the flowers spilled out. The sort of thing a photographer would do with a set up. And of course he can’t turn in the set up so he takes a transparency and turns it in. I went out of the office realizing they could work from transparencies. So the next time I did a cover I didn’t bring in the painting, I brought in a transparency. And the art director said, “What is this?”. So I said, “You showed me the transparency the photographer handed in, obviously you can work from it. This is no different from that”. So he said, “We really need the original”, and I said “I don’t think you really do need the original, because when you get them I don’t get them back”. So he took the transparency and I did this for two or three covers, and I guess they had some kind of in office discussion, because after a few times they agreed to give me back my originals back.
T That’s really great!
J It was kind of a game I had to play to convince them I really did want them back. They really had no right to them, and they could work without them if they had to.
T Do you have any idea what they did with them?
J Yes I do. They were stored in a warehouse and once every few years somebody would come over from Europe and would go through piles of paintings in the warehouse, and take the paintings or take photographs of the paintings, and the company would sell them for something like $25.00. It was their way of making a little extra money. They had really no right to the original. There was never anything in writing that said they owned it, but no one ever questioned it up until around 1970, when people began to do that. It’s changed around a lot since then. A lot of this was due of course to Frazetta who was the first one to demand the originals back. Luckily for the artists that enough people have done that, so it’s no problem any more.
T I read in an interview with the Frazettas that you had visited them when you were first starting out.
J Yeah, I went out there a few times. I was introduced to them by a mutual friend, Larry Ivie.
T Did you bring work to show them?
J Yeah, I brought work.
T Did he give you encouragement and inspiration?
J Every original I saw by an artist in those days gave me inspiration. I used to hang out in museums. I’d visit every artist I could, just the magic of the original painting.
T There’s a world of difference.
J A big difference to staring at a paperback cover on a rack. Frazetta’s work of course were so much more in reality than they ever were printed.
T Have you been to the Frazetta Museum yet? It’s really a nice display.
J No, I never get over in that direction. I’d like to see it.
T Are you still inspired by artists? If you see someone’s work that you haven’t seen before, does it affect your work, or is your style evolved within yourself?
J I don’t think I’m so affected by the style of other people’s work any more. When an artist is young they are always searching for a way to express themselves. They try out a lot of different things. Eventually it all synthesizes together into the way that artist, who is maturing, will eventually express himself. I think once a certain point is reached then the style of another artist is not so impressive anymore. It’s more of the way they look at things, the way they perceive things. The feeling of their painting as it comes across.
T Who are some of the people who influenced you when you were younger?
J N.C. Wyeth was a big influence. I was influenced a lot by the art in the Metropolitan Museum also a couple of years later.
T Winslow Homer?
J Homer certainly. Rembrandt for awhile. Of course Rembrandt is immortal and you never tire of looking at his work, but there is a certain period there where Rembrandt and Gustav Klimt, and then a little later Whistler, Monet.
T Was Rockwell ever an influence?
J Not really. I’ve always admired his drawing. He did things that just did not interest me. He had a very strong story telling sense in a painting. I wasn’t interested in being that narrative. Also I tend to work with one figure in a painting, and he almost always had an interaction of figures in a painting. He also worked in current day settings, current at the time, which I also was never interested in. I was interested in his technique certainly, but never in his painting.
T When you started working professionally you had already moved to New York. Did you know Berni or Mike before moving there, or was this later?
J I didn’t know Berni or Mike when I moved to New York. I met them both at a convention in 1968, and Berni and I immediately started corresponding. He was still living in Baltimore and Michael was still in Richmond.
Now I had begun to do a lot of work in 1969. I did more covers in one year that I ever did, before or since, and I took on more work than I was ready for. So Berni, through the mail, worked on some of these paintings. He did preliminary drawings for a few paintings I was working on during that time, I guess it was late 1968, first half of ’69. He would do the pencils and then I would get them and change them to what I thought was needed for the cover. I’ve never made a list but I would imagine at that time there were 3. After he moved to New York we did 2 or 3 more, so there are 5 or 6 in all.
T I was wondering if you could talk about how you first met Vaughn Bode’.
J I met him in 1968 at the same con I met Berni and Mike. That was the con where we all met.
T Did you hit it off right away? I understand you shared an apartment later.
J That was like four years later. Yeah, we became friends. Berni and I, Vaughn and I, Berni and Vaughn. We hung out together during that convention and then we all went our separate ways. And then Vaughn would come back to New York. He was doing work out of New York, but not living there, so he would commute to N.Y. once or twice a month, so we all got to know each other better. He didn’t want to move to the city, and I was at a point where I was ready to leave, and Berni had moved up in this area (Woodstock) just a few months before this, so we came to this area to look for a place, and we found a house in Woodstock that we rented for a year – an estate really.
T Were the two Warren covers the only work you had done together?
J Yes.
T We’ve talked about The Studio in our APA. Could you tell us what one day in The Studio was like for you?
J Boy those days were different. The 3 years that we were there seemed a lot longer than 3 years. I think basically because there wasn’t any one day in the studio.. Every day was so different that it felt like so much crammed into those 3 years. It changed so much. For the first period Michael wasn’t there. Then he became part of it. Then for awhile Berni was not there, maybe 8 months to a year at the end he moved to Florida, so he wasn’t there for part of it. So it was the middle part that all four of us were there. Barry started doing work at home near the end, so Michael and I were there pretty much at the end. In fact Michael and I were almost living there. We both had apartments, he had one uptown, I had one in Chelsea, but for some reason we ended up staying in the studio.
T He told me he moved a lot of his belongings there.
J Yeah, I had most of mine there. I’d go back to my apartment, and I’d have a chair, a bed, a desk and a television, but there’d be nothing to do because everything that I did was at the studio. We had a bed and a couch and a table there, and our schedules were quite different. Michael worked at night and I’d work during the day, so we’d take turns sleeping on the couch or the bed, or putting pillows on the table and sleeping there. So we pretty much lived there the whole time. Quite often we were all there working at the same time, all four of us, but I think more often than not we weren’t all working together because our schedules really were different.
T What was the reason you left?
J Our lease was up. It was very simple. There was nothing dramatic about it. We were subletting for 3 years and when the lease was up the people we were subletting from needed the space back, so we had to leave. There wasn’t even any renewing. We knew when we moved in the studio would be there 3 years.
T Is there anything that comes to mind that you never would have illustrated if you hadn’t worked in The Studio?
J No, I don’t think there is anything I wouldn’t have illustrated. I didn’t do a lot of illustrating while I was in the studio. I was in the process of changing over, doing paintings for themselves, paintings I would do prints of, and of course sell the originals. The illustration work I did while I was in the studio would have come my way regardless of whether I was there or not. There’s probably some illustration work I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to turn down if I hadn’t been at the studio. Michael ended up doing a job that originally had come to me. It was an album cover for Lenny White. I got a phone call and I had no interest in doing it so I just held up the phone and said anyone want to do an album cover? And Michael took it.
T Are a lot of the paintings that you do commissions?
J Not really. I do maybe 2 commissions a year. Most of the paintings that I do now are paintings that occur to me in the middle of the night, middle of the day, and I put them up for sale after they are done. But most of them are not commissions.
T When you get a commission, is the idea suggested to you or do they just ask for a piece?
J The more specific the suggestion the less able I am to do it because I’m not interested in painting what someone else sees. So it’s very general. It may be a portrait, which of course has a subject matter, but the rest of it’s up to me. Or sometimes it’s as vague as someone will call and ask if I have any figurative paintings of women, and if I don’t, they say let me know next time you have one for sale. So in a sense that’s sort of a commission and the subject matter is there but it’s something I would do anyway.
T Do you put more work into a painting than you would for a strip such as ‘I’m Age’.
J No. I would usually take, I guess in terms of just physical work, about a week to do one of the strips for Heavy Metal, and that’s about what it would take me to do a painting. I’ve had paintings that have taken longer, and paintings that have taken less time, but I think there’s a certain amount of energy I have to put into it, whether it be a painting or a strip, and I have a certain attention span I can allow myself to handle before I become bored with it, and want to go onto something else before I feel it’s finished. So I don’t think it makes any difference if it’s a strip or a drawing or a painting. That’s primarily why I did the single page strips for so many years, is because of that attention span I have.
T Is that why you stopped doing the ‘I’m Age’ strip in Heavy Metal.
J Not really. I just stopped doing it because I wasn’t interested in doing it anymore. There wasn’t any specific reason. I’d done it for 3 years.
T Is there a field of illustration that you haven’t done that you would like to do?
J I’m not interested in illustrating so the answer to that would be no. There are a lot of paintings I haven’t done, but I don’t know what they are until I get to them. I seem to always have a feeling for what I want to do next, but not beyond that, because what I do next leads me to something else.
T We talked about your first story earlier, ‘Dragonslayer’, and years later you did the movie poster of the same name.
J Yeah, I thought of that. It occurred to me after I had done it.
T How did that project come about?
J I got a call from the producer who said he really liked my work, and told me about this movie he was working on co-producing.
They asked if I would come out to San Francisco, so I said sure. They flew me out there on a weekend and we went to Zoetrope Studios, and they ran the working print of
the movie they had. It was part in color, part in black and white, some of the music was there, most of the dialog was there, but it
was spliced together. They showed me that and asked me if I was interested in doing
the poster, and I said yes I was. They were very nice people, very easy to work with. I had heard horror stories about doing movie posters where not only do they tell you what to do, but it’s a board of people trying to tell you what to do, and each one of them is not even sure what they want, so from the time you start ‘til the time you’re finished it goes through so many changes. But I didn’t have that problem with them. There didn’t seem to be a board of people who were trying to tell me what to do. They were very easy to work with and they seemed to really like what I did.
T Do you keep up with today’s comics?
J No. I don’t even know what comics are being put out.
T I was wondering how you came to be involved with Jon J Muth. He is heavily influenced by you. (Muth dedicated his Dracula graphic novel to Jeff) Was there ever any instruction on your part?
J There was never any instruction. He came out to the area to visit a few years ago. I met him the first time at a convention and he wrote and said he’d like to come out for a visit from Ohio. He came out a couple of times over about a two year period, and then decided he wanted to move out here. And I was living at a place at the time where I didn’t have as much room as I wanted for a studio, so we decided to get a studio together, which we did for a year. There certainly was never any formal instruction.
T Just working together.
J Yeah, just working in the same space.
T From my understanding each one of the Studio artists had designed their own section, and then it was changed later by the publisher.
J Right.
T Did you have any part in designing the contents of ‘Yesterday’s Lily’?
J No. After what we went through with The Studio book, after all the work we put into designing our own sections and then seeing how it was changed around completely I didn’t see any point in trying to put that into ‘Yesterday’s Lily’, because it was going to end up the way it was going to end up anyway. I put together all the work that I would like to see in it and went to England and laid the work out, and they made decisions from there. There is a lot of work that did not go into it, but there was no work in it that was a surprise to me. The layout was a surprise. I had nothing to do with that.
T Were you happy with the book?
J Yeah, I thought it was nice.
T It was beautiful except for all of the green in the cover. (Blind Narcissus)
J The cover was very green. In fact every time that’s been printed it’s been printed a different color. I haven’t seen two that match yet.
T Was the print done by Cygnus close?
J That was pretty close. That’s the closest yet. The painting itself, the original is very grey, and the Cygnus print got that closer than any of the others.
T I was told you did the photography for the photoprints that were sold by The Studio artists.
J Yeah.
T Is photography a hobby of yours?
J No, I don’t do much photography. Shooting artwork and going out with a camera are two totally different things. The stuff we did in the studio was just setting up the artwork and trying to get the lighting right. It had to be a real technically precise job. There was nothing creative about it. So we would just shoot 4 x 5 negatives, and they’d be used for the photoprints.
T Have you given into the idea of doing a graphic novel?
J No, never! Crossed my mind in the briefest of seconds. (Laughter) I could not keep up the interest in something that long that would take that much time. It’s just not in me. I couldn’t do a 22 page comic, let alone a 60 – 70 page book.
T Are you still producing signed & numbered prints?
J No. Cygnus was doing them for awhile, and if they become established they have interest in doing others. If any prints are done they’ll be done by other publishers. I’m not going to publish my own work anymore. The shipping took too much time, because what I really wanted to do was draw and paint, and I got into the shipping business. I didn’t want to do that.
T Do you have any goals for your work, maybe appearing in the Metropolitan someday?
J Oh, any of that stuff would be nice, but no, I’m not aiming at that.
T Have you had gallery showings in Europe?
J I’ve had a small number of showings in Europe and a small number of showings here. I would like to have other gallery shows. I’ve been asked about having gallery shows, but the work that I’m producing more or less sells as I do it. I have people who write and call who are interested in buying my work, and for me to have a gallery show I would either have to do twice as much work, or stop selling what I’m doing, and since I make a living selling the work I can’t stop selling it. So the only alternative is to do twice as much work, but I don’t know. We’ll see. I don’t know if I can do that.
T How productive are you? Do you work all the time?
J No, I don’t work all the time. I work as much in my head as I work at my easel, so I’m working when it doesn’t look like I’m working. I probably do an average of two paintings a month, maybe three. Something like that. It feels about right, right now. I’ll have to increase that to 6 if I’m going to have a gallery show, and I think the work would suffer right now if I tried to do that, because the time in between painting is as important as the time painting. It helps the ideas for the painting to become firmer and more realized. I don’t know. We’ll see if I can increase my output or not. It’s something I’ve been wondering about myself.
T Can you give us an idea of what’s in your future? To continue painting –
J I’m certainly going to continue painting. I would like the paintings that I’m doing and that I have been doing in the past 4 or 5 years to be put together in a book form when there is enough of them. I’ve had publishers who are interested in this. I don’t feel I have enough work at the moment to do a whole book. ‘Yesterday’s Lily’ was pretty slim and I think that was 96 pages, but there were certainly more than one picture on a page as an average, so we’re talking maybe 200 paintings. I haven’t accumulated that much. I don’t think I want to do a book where there is just one picture on every page. It’s pretty dull. It becomes more of a portfolio than a book. I like books to be designed so that the more important work can appear bigger, sketches can appear smaller and give some sense of fluidity to the whole process.
T Do you work in sketchbooks?
J No, I don’t. I work on loose pieces of paper, but I don’t work in books. They have always intimidated me. They sit around empty for years before I even put anything on the first page. I find that if I only have sketchbooks around to work in I don’t work. So I like loose pieces of paper.
T Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts and time.
J Your welcome.
