Collingwood’s Kaz Jones paints what you know, like you’ve never seen it before
by Gabrielle Bernier
A humble wildflower: a captivatingly delicate, yet strong and determined monument to the beauty of the everyday. In her latest series, Simcoe County-based artist Kaz Jones harnesses the creamy richness and saturated colour of oil paint to infuse oft-overlooked flowers with iconic status.
A graduate of the University of Guelph and Queen’s University, Jones is all the richer from years of travel that whisked her from Crete to Colombia to Canada’s Pacific Coast. She now calls the shores of Georgian Bay and the Tremont Studios in Collingwood home.
She perceives her subjects from an off-kilter perspective with an exaggerated sense of design, conveying their essence with minimal information. This unique perspective also shines in her previous works, such as her popular series of Great Lakes ships celebrating Collingwood’s shipbuilding history, and her tractor series, paying homage to the noble, rusty farmland staple.
Her paintings begin as plein air sketches and take shape over a cup of tea and a think about how to best represent her subject in paint. Her guiding philosophy? “Paint what you know, paint what moves you and paint for the pure love of disappearing into the process.”
You can find Jones’s work at Tremont Studios, Butter Gallery and Sol Kitchen in Collingwood, Mad and Noisy Gallery in Creemore and Matilda Swanson Gallery in Clarksburg, or on Instagram @kazjonesart. ❧
