This body of work continues to steadily evolve and grow in new directions. I continue to draw upon several sources present in my life; raising a family, teaching, practicing architecture and the art making process itself inform and direct my work. I have created work that ranges from explorations in surface abstraction; highly saturated color fields; and realistic figuration occasionally incorporated into a single piece. I continue to draw upon and incorporate ideas from my past work. Working with a reductive palette, color has been minimized in this current work. Each of the works bridge several stylistic categories of abstraction, expressionism, and realism. Meaning is often found in making.

I am attempting to recall and recombine many facets of my development as an artist from childhood to my adult life. Most obvious and recurring is an expression of origin in the persona of a mischievous child, willing to take risks, experiment and "play". Somewhat self-possessed, obsessive and impulsive, appearing fearless, pushing to the brink of disaster only to see what results. Exhibiting a willingness to tear down or to destroy, start over, rebuild, reconfigure and reconstruct because making art is tantamount to "play".

A tradition of drawing forms the foundation for this current work: line, shape and form first developed in drawings are further manipulated in paintings then continue into three dimensions in sculptures.

Each of the paintings shown have been reconstructed and restructured from previously completed pieces. The original paintings have been sectioned into equal increments in proportion to their respective original size. Working from two distinctly separate originals two new paintings are created by rearranging and recombining the sections from each into new configurations. The individual sections are adhered onto two newly stretched canvases once new relationships are discovered and a composition is satisfactory: a liberating and fairly labor-intensive process. Then more painting continues. There is similarity in the spatial manipulation of the paintings to that what occurs in handheld children's puzzles that I recall from my youth.

I am examining the "architecture" of drawing, painting and sculpture: the physical properties of these objects, the thickness or thinness of a material, how it is joined and constructed, the details of its making, qualities of line and shape, smudges of charcoal, crusts of paint, the "stuff" of material, idiosyncrasies, nuance and irregularities indicating the hand of the artist.

DENNIS MICHAEL JONES