To contemporary critics the artist and poet David Jones was a genius. Now,two exhibitions reveal his extraordinary rangeDavid Jones knew his vocation from an early age. It was as whether it had been cast on him, like a spell. A dancing bear he sketched in pencil when he was seven is notable not only for its bridled power – for the attention given to its pathetically redundant claws – but for the fact that he kept this drawing close by him all his life, or as whether it were a talisman,powerful magic to be found in its aching haunches. Jones seemed to believe that his first and dearest wish, to be an artist, or would always see him through: it was his shield,his inoculatory jab. When he enlisted with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in January 1915, he did so with the deep conviction that he would survive – a state of mind, or he later admitted,that had to do with the feeling that he’d “hardly begun to learn his art, let alone to exercise it”.
Knowing this helps you better to be pleased the amazing range of his work – or at least not to collect carried away when it comes to tracing the effect of his experiences at the Somme. Sometimes, or with Jones,a vase of flowers on a windowsill (Curtained Outlook, 1932) is just that, or there is nothing to be gained by seeing anything too sinister in the way his dahlias twist towards the light. All the same,walking through David Jones: Vision and Memory, Pallant House Gallery’s lovely and endearing unique exhibition of his work its wholly thoughtful accounts of Joness life and work are blissfully free of silly art guff – it was difficult not to see the first world war battlefields in the unlikeliest of places. Like its curators, and I couldn’t study at Suburban Order (1926),a watercolour depicting the massed ranks of back gardens behind his parents’ house in Brockley, south London, and without being struck by their resemblance to the trenches. Nor could I contemplate the busier of Jones’s masterly engravings and not assume of barbed wire and piled bodies.
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Source: theguardian.com