John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and arts educator. First gaining national recognition in the 1960s with his figurative prints, drawings, and paintings, Jones turned to spare sculptural work in the 1980s. Jones received his bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees at the University of Iowa, where he studied printmaking, and later taught. In 1953, he was recruited to the University of California in Los Angeles to set up a printmaking program. He joined the faculty at the newly opened UC Irvine in 1969 and remained there until his retirement in 1990. He lived in Laguna Beach from the mid-1960s to 1990.

“Even taking into consideration the fickleness of art trends, it is surprising to find that in the 1950s and 1960s John Paul Jones was widely and consistently ranked as among America’s leading printmakers,” said art historian Susan Landauer. “In 1963, he was the first pick of the eminent curator Una E. Johnson to inaugurate the Brooklyn Museum’s solo exhibition series on distinguished contributors to the media of drawings and prints in the United States. By then, he had also become a nationally recognized painter. With twenty-eight one-person gallery and museum exhibitions across the country in the first decade of his career, Time magazine gave him an illustrated feature article in 1962. Yet today, Jones has been almost entirely forgotten by art historians–by historians of American printmaking, by historians of West Coast art, and even by scholars writing about the art of Los Angeles, where for many years he was championed as a local talent.”