While taking a watercolor class more than 30 years ago, Sheep Jones became bored with painting daffodil blossoms in vases and decided to focus instead on the parts of the flower below the surface—the roots and bulbs suspended in water. That inspired her to think about what she could put in the earth within her paintings, she says—“bugs, worms, water tables, little gnomes, fish.” Jones, who studied painting at the University of Southern Maine and was an artist at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, for two decades, has worked in a variety of media over her 50-year career. Her current pieces use a combination of oil and cold wax on wood panel to create mysterious, dreamlike scenes inspired by her home in Belfast, Maine.
Hide 25, oil on wood, 12x12 inches.
Jones’s two most popular series have been her “Fish Walkers” and “Hide” paintings. “Fish Walkers,” which she says dovetailed from that initial desire to explore the underground, shows various men, women, and nonbinary figures in water up to their calves—as they “walk” a fish on a leash. “After I did my first one, it was sort of a breakthrough painting for me,” Jones says. “I thought, I’m so thrilled with this.” To date, she has done more than 110 of these works, each one showing a different figure walking a different fish. Her “Hide” series, meanwhile, showcases childlike figures wearing animal hides on their heads. Jones can’t recall exactly where the idea came from—“maybe my son was wearing a funny hat one day,” she says. The series title, she notes, has a double meaning: the figures are not only wearing hides but are also hiding within the shadows created by them.
