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French House;Frank Jones;Huntsville prison, 1X;1965-66;Red and blue pencil on paper;24 x 22na;Collection ofChapman and Joan Kelley.
in his drawings they appeared harmless, they posed a real and constant threat. Although Jones depicted the haint figures smiling, they were anything but benign. He explained that the haints smile "to get you to come closer.., to drag you down and make you do bad things. They laugh when they do that!' And at another time, Jones said they smile because "they're happy, waiting for your sour" Jones's devil houses achieve a sense of balance based on the tension of opposing forces. By alternating the colors red and blue and the direction of the devils' horns, Jones created the surface pattern and the internal rhythm of his drawings. At the beginning, the drawings were red and blue due to the artist's access to found materials; later this color scheme became a conscious Winter 1990
aesthetic decision. By late 1964 the Atelier Chapman Kelley was providing Jones with pencils and paper and he began to experiment, adding violet, brown, acid green, and other colors to the drawings. But Jones "did not like" the other colors, and soon he returned to blue and red, which he said represented smoke and fire The colors red and blue are imbued with spiritual significance in both African and African-American lore. The combination of blue, the favorite color of the Yoruba people of Africa (suggesting the qualities of gentleness and submission), and red (identified with power and spiritual command), allude to the co-existence of dual, opposing forces" These colors, which continue to hold symbolic spiritual power in the New World, are found repeatedly and
in diverse locations. For example, red and blue are important protective colors in the Vodun religion; and they appear as a favorite color scheme in Georgia Sea Island quilts, where they suggest "the binary opposites hot/cool, good/ bad, safe/dangerous:' Red signifies "danger, fire, conflict, and passion;" and blue is "a good color used... to keep away bad spirits!'" The structures of devil houses were evidently inspired by the prison, and other iconographical elements in Jones's works are traceable to his material environment. The clock, an icon of time and its passage on one level, is symbolic ofimprisonment on another — prison slang for incarceration is "doing time:' The image also relates to a specific clock in the prison yard which Jones believed was "hainter Jones included clocks in nearly half of his drawings. In the early works time seems to stand still, but in later works appendages to the hands of the clocks spin uncontrollably, an apparent reference to the artist's increasing awareness of his mortality. The circle bisected by a cross is a protective device found throughout African-American visionary art. This motif, which derives from Kongo cosmic symbols related to the spirit world,' appears repeatedly throughout Jones's drawings — often at the center of a pinwheel that suggests the motion of time or perhaps the orbiting of a celestial body. Another common motif in Jones's work is the pair of dice. Emblems of gambling (which Jones considered an evil activity), the dice also relate to the artist's conflict with a world of random forces — often a sizzling, electric energy radiates from the dice as a signal of these forces. Jones's early works were rigidly drawn,small-scale depictions of simple structures populated only by minimal figures. As his career rapidly developed, his style flourished along with his growing confidence. By 1965-66 Jones had hit his stride as an artist. The compositions became elegant and flowing as the devils' horn shapes began to curve inward and outward, interacting gracefully with each other. A variety of haint species fluttered and gyrated 47
.