Nicolette’s Father

John Jones - A man with a beard and striped shirt sitting by a window, holding a cigarette to his lips, looking up thoughtfully.
John Jones - A colorful painting of a seaside village with boats docked in the harbor, houses on a hillside, and a cloudy sky.
John Jones - Painting of a woman with short brown hair, wearing a light-colored top and dark jacket, sitting in front of an abstract green background with circular and leaf shapes.

“I don’t have any kind of mission as I paint. It’s an activity for its own sake, without point. Isn’t there something better to do with one’s life? If there is I’m not sure what it is … I’m really rather greedy for art in all its contradictory manifestations. I’m the ideal consumer. You don’t have to play musak to make me reach for the art packet. I fill my trolley indiscriminately.” – John Jones

John Edward Jones NDD ATD Dip FA RWA (August 1926-October 2010) was a painter, teacher, film-maker, collector and Joycean who spent much of his working life at the University of Leeds.

Born in Gloucestershire to Stanley and Ivy Jones, he studied at Colston’s School, Stapleton and the West of England College of Art in Bristol.

Called up in 1944, he served with the Royal Engineers in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy and Egypt before returning to the West of England College of Art in 1948 where he retook the art course from the beginning (still taught by George Sweet), and went on to the Slade School of Art (University College, London) where his teachers included Claude Rogers, William Coldstream and the art historian Rudolf Wittkower. He graduated with a diploma in Fine Art in 1954 and won the Art History Prize.

After painting murals in coffee bars and night clubs in London and running the art department at a school in Kent, he went with Gabriela, Rudolf Wittkower’s niece, to her home in Buenos Aires. They were married in 1957. In Argentina John Jones had one-man shows of his work, and designed silver jewellery, coffee tables and fabric.

Back in the UK in 1959 he became a lecturer in Art at Leeds Day Training College, Head of the Art Department at James Graham College (in 1961) and in 1963 a Lecturer (later Senior Lecturer) in the Fine Art Department at Leeds University, appointed by Professor Quentin Bell. Together he and Bell pioneered a new kind of Fine Art Department – half practice and half art history (the teaching of the practice of art was hitherto confined to art schools). Under Bell, and his successor Professor Lawrence Gowing, Jones ran the studios, while Bell and Gowing (both also practising artists) ran the art history course.

John Jones also instigated and ran a course on film-making and the history of film within the Fine Art Department. He and Gaby were married for 53 years and had two daughters, Rachel and Nicolette, two sons-in-law, David and Nicholas, and two granddaughters, Rebecca and Laura.