The Western Illinois Folio Press
The five principal portfolio productions of the Western Illinois Folio Press are serendipitous in conception and execution. The works - the two one-person folios created by the Press's founder and director Fred Jones as well as the three folios which altogether include twenty- nine visual artists and writers - are evolutionary, depending as much upon circumstance as upon artistic plan. The reason the folios have emerged as individual objects of art (albeit composites of individual works of art) is that Jones's tenacious artistic vision is coupled with a synergistic process of their assemblage. The art and poetry by the twenty-nine artists in this twenty-year retrospective are not diminished when we think of each of the folios as a singular production, coming together like a well-directed stage play.
Such ambitious collaboration - the bringing together of individual works of art to make a conceptual whole - is what Fred Jones designed the Western Illinois Folio Press to do. His life and education have prepared him well for understanding both the potential of the portfolio as art and the ideas it could contain. Jones describes himself as having a "hybrid identity." * By this he means that he is a bicultural artist of multiple media and interdisciplinary interests. His mind and psyche were formed in the tiny village of Llanymynech in eastern mid-Wales on the border with England. In the surrounding countryside the legendary pan-Celtic Welsh hero Caratacus fought his last great battle against the Romans in the first century A.D., and the house Jones grew up in is said to have been inhabited in 1831 by a neophyte geologist named Charles Darwin. The valley cut by the meandering River Vyrnwy puts thousands of years of human history into a perspective of timelessness just as it does the vestigial remains of a more recently decaying 19th-century limestone quarry that marks the one instance of industrial importance for the village. The thematic implications are clear. Nature, as Jones has witnessed from his earliest years, repossesses its own.
In 1971, three years after taking a position at Western Illinois University, Jones moved to a farmhouse on a small piece of land south of Macomb, Illinois. It proved to be a move that helped him to adjust to a vastly different culture from what he had known in Wales. Though west-central Illinois is comparatively sparsely populated, Illinois' total population is four times that of his native country and many of its inhabitants possess an accent flat as the landscape on which they have settled.
To most Illinoisans, history is recent, the future matters, and cultural mythology is related to their religious, not their national or communal heritage. But from the seasonal changes, the storms, and the never-ending sky, Jones discovered that nature responds to the aspirations of human beings just as it had in his native village. The forces of nature conspire to awe and excite, confound and enthrall by their omnipresence and their unpredictability if not their indifference to human desires.
On the west-central Illinois prairie, in fact, the experience is accentuated, for witnessed up close in the absolutely open sky, nature is an inescapable, grand, never-ending metaphor for the human spirit. There Jones reaffirmed for himself what he had long practiced in his formal schooling and years as a studio artist. The experience is summed up in these words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature: "Art is nature passed through the alembic of man."
The ideas that nature is integral to the human condition and that the process of art begins with nature are evident in the Western Illinois Folio Press productions. Jones's unique artistic contribution is that he has understood how these ideas could be examined with contemporary tools as well as traditional methods and from both the perspective of image and word. Thus, he allows the viewer to observe these ideas through a wide-range of media and methodologies, making them attractive and accessible to a broad audience ranging from the connoisseur of traditional art to the devotee of digital imaging. Jones's education, inclination, and practice indicate that producing these collaborative portfolios.
Firmly grounded in drawing, painting, and printmaking at Cardiff College of Art and the University of Wales, Jones came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1964-65 to study art education with a studio emphasis, returned home to teach, then returned to the States three years later to pursue his career at Western Illinois University. Almost immediately he began working on an M.F.A. in printmaking at the University of Wisconsin where he became intrigued by the fine art of making books being practiced there. He completed the M.F.A. in 1971 and shortly thereafter began to shift his attention from the non-figurative work he had been doing to metaphorically-structured prints and paintings of landscape. One result was his initial independent compilation entitled Mid West Portfolio (1976), comprised of twenty-four silkscreen, linocut, and embossed images which he created as "poetic translations of the land forms and weather patterns" of western Illinois. In 1979 he attended William Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris, concentrating with an international group of fellow students on the history, practice, and possibilities of book art and of collaborative work among artists and writers. This experience was a revelation to him that work he had been doing was firmly fixed in an international universe of artistic collaboration and that it could be practiced in the Midwest in the region in which he had chosen to live and work. Upon his return from Paris and further study at Birgit Skiold's Print Workshop in London, Jones set up the Western Illinois Folio Press under the auspices of the University and embarked on his first major collaborative production. Almost a decade later as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in 1988, he spent a year learning computer graphics, an experience which enabled him not only to expand artistic opportunities for his own students but also to gain an understanding of how to bring a show of this magnitude to the Web.
The Western Illinois Folio Press's first production, Western Illinois Portfolio, twenty-four works by four printmakers and four poets, contains a piece by Archie Laun, the pseudonym for Roland Grass, a Western Illinois University professor of Romance languages who also was an artist and poet. With Jones, Grass had served as a consultant for the Mississippi Valley Review, a multidisciplinary journal published at Western Illinois University and edited by Forrest Robinson, who also contributes poems to this portfolio. Laun's "Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe" may be the seminal instance at which Jones decided to engage in what would prove to be a demanding if not exhausting activity that he would pursue over the next two decades. He says, "In 1978, I wrote a program in Basic that used a concrete poem by Roland Grass...as its inspiration.
"The computer prints on the monitor a random display of letters that are typed on the keyboard. When the viewer sees a pattern that he likes, the computer is stopped and a hardcopy is printed. This becomes the concrete poem. The act of choosing an image becomes the act of creativity. Today artists and programmers are creating environments that react to the human presence with sounds, lights, and tactile sensations." ** Not only was Jones thinking in the late-seventies of the computer as a creative tool; he was also thinking of it, as were his friends and mentors Phil Hamilton and Ted Pope of the University of Wisconsin, as a means of increasing collaborative artistic efforts as is now being commonly done by writers and artists throughout the world in hyperimaging and hypertext. But there is more to this collaborative act with Laun/Grass than its technological potential. Grass and Robinson were principal among the "factors" that inspired the Folio Press. The Mississippi Valley Review had become a regional magazine of national significance by the time Jones became an art consultant. And the dialogue among its editors and consultants confirmed for Jones that he was on the right track. It also confirmed that bringing together multiple works of art in a singular production produces an unusually kinetic and spiritual energy. Roland Grass died in the year of this first production. But his second poem, "Old Law," presupposes his legacy to Jones and to those who appeared with him in this first folio: "Matter can neither be created nor destroyed."
Not surprisingly, Jones's first portfolio, coming as it did at the onset of the 1980s, contains transitional art, marking his own move from non-figurative to symbolic images. Laun's concrete poems, reminiscent of Dada in rendition, are complemented by Bob Evans's mechanical templates for nature. But all the work creates a sense of the place that is western Illinois, whether it evokes meditation as in Terry Newell's photographic prints of the region's residents, philosophical observations as in Jones's own pig fantasies, or humor as in the sublimely whimsical pig drawings of Art Geisert, the internationally-known artist of childrens' books, or attempts to translate the landscape directly into emotion and drama as Robinson's, Mann's, and my own poems. The act of creating this folio brought artists and poets together literally to labor on its composition of pages and later to have dialogues and readings stemming from the work. It exceeded expectations, touring throughout the state for the next five years, becoming a part of permanent collections of individuals and institutions, serving as a model for ensuing portfolios, and, most important of all, establishing the fact that a viable community of artists could be gathered in downstate Illinois.
Jonesís next collaborative venture was to see whether that community could be formed equally well internationally. Following a trip to Wales to visit his Welsh friend, the poet Tony Curtis, Jones began to pursue the possibility of what became the Welsh American Portfolio (1984), fourteen art works by Welsh Americans and fourteen poems by Welsh poets. Logistics made this assemblage of work an immensely challenging undertaking. But the success of the Western Illinois Portfolio and the uniqueness of the venture by the Western Illinois Folio Press brought sufficient funding from both sides of the Atlantic to see the job through to completion. The presentation of the poetic images is unique because the poems are printed in both Welsh and English and are presented on the page by the Welsh calligrapher Jonah Jones. The portfolio makes clear the impressive influence of Welsh artists in America, including as it does the work of Mac Adams, a practicing New York City artist; Hanlyn Davies, a professor of art at the University of Massachusetts; Bob Evans, then curator of exhibits at the Illinois State Museum; Mags Harries, a member of the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Jones, whose work in this portfolio reflects his dedication to the Western Illinois landscape; Roy Slade, President of the Cranbrook Academy of Art; and Keith Wood, an artist in New York City. All but Evans are Welsh natives. The poets were chosen with the help of Curtis and are among the most influential writers in English and Welsh in this century, having received among them the highest honors for poetry in Wales and England. Curtis, Danny Abse, Euros Bowen, Gillian Clarke, Robert Maynard (Bobi Jones), Glyn Jones, and Gwyn Thomas span a century of Welsh poetry, and their work is firmly grounded in the ancient mythos of the country in which they were born. As with the Western Illinois Portfolio, formal readings followed the release of the work, the exhibition toured both the United States and the United Kingdom for three years, and it is now included in public and private collections.
A natural result of the Welsh American Portfolio was that it stimulated Jones to explore his own Welsh heritage in a totally different format. While Village Memories (1993) is Jones's singular art work, in a sense it is clearly collaborative in as much as it relies on the faces, voices, and memories of an elder generation of residents in Llanymynech. Village Memories serves as an end of the century "time capsule" for a community, of which Jerry Klein wrote in an essay accompanying the release of the exhibition, that is "a stirring reminder...that history is not limited to wars and treaties and elections and assassinations, but is wonderfully present in the lives of most ordinary and unspectacular people." *** This was obviously a work of pleasure for Jones, for his interviews and photographs unveil the voices and faces of a humanity that, living close to nature, is aware of the value of humility in an evanescent world. The sentiment is one that Jones's colleagues in the previous portfolios had been exploring, and in this work he finds it resonating in the voices and images of his native land.
The Illinois Portfolio (1998), the last of the portfolios from the Western Illinois Folio Press, returned Jones to the dramatic landscape where he lives and brought full circle the collaborative exploration begun two decades previously with the Western Illinois Portfolio. This collection draws on a community of artists and a community of poets well-known to one another. Here Jones confidently relied on a process which allowed each participant to provide work on the meaning each found in the landscape and skyscape of Illinois. Three of the Western Illinois Portfolio participants are represented here: Forrest Robinson, Fred Jones, and me. This time, however, Jones drew on noted landscape artists Harold Gregor, James Winn, Ann Coulter, and Michael Dubina, and I helped select Lisel Mueller (who coincidentally won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the year of the portfolio's release), John Knoepfle, Dave Etter, and Kevin Stein - all writers with a reputation extending far beyond Illinois. The original works of the artists in this production were reduced in size by the inkjet process to fit the portfolio, making a strikingly true rendition of much larger paintings, a technique unavailable in earlier portfolios. Both the original paintings and the portfolio images toured the State of Illinois and were available on the Internet. The paintings and the poems reflect on the sense of place that can only be gotten through the artists having experienced personally the natural environment's dominant presence in our lives. The wonder of the portfolio process is revealed here in the spontaneous accumulation of complementary images with no prescription for how they should be painted or written. This is a capstone realization of the vision for which the Western Illinois Folio Press was founded to achieve.
Throughout the production of the portfolios, the multidisciplinary work that had carried Jones into the enterprise led him to continue his work in a singular portfolio he titled Pig Passages Book. This evolving project elaborates upon images and ideas he had begun to cultivate as early as 1979 at Atelier 17. The book was first completed in 1982 and later reformatted in an accordian binding with Chinese translation in 1987. The portfolio, composed of Jones's serigraphs, etchings, and engravings, is both a philosophical statement and a bold experiment with disciplines he had not yet explored professionally. The twelve images in the book which Jones wrote, illustrated, printed, and bound trace the transcendental passage of pigs upon a naturescape that resembles the western Illinois prairie sky in all of its turbulent grandeur. In what seems to be a nod to Dante's Divine Comedy and chaos theory, this fable juxtaposes the sound and fury with which humanity engages life against a far greater din of a spectacular but indifferent universe. In the climactic conclusion, the pigs come together in a spontaneous hugfest as the universe, in an image worthy of William Blake, appears to illuminate in exaltation.
The Pig Passages Book has become Jones's most intense statement about how natural forces reclaim their own. Originally Jones intended the fable to suggest a way out of what seemed at the time to be ineluctable nuclear annihilation. Gradually he came to regard the story as an ecological admonition.**** This evolving interpretation reflects a growing cultural sensitivity to the need for human beings to assume responsibility for their own destiny. In order to survive, they must collectively alter their priorities away from selfishness toward selflessness, away from anthropocentric shortsightedness toward an ecologically-centered vision. The work provides a resounding affirmation of the creative process that has engaged Jones for the past two decades. It is a process that has forged a large body of collaborative work which speaks to the relationships between nature, humanity, and art.
* In a lecture by Jones titled "Hybrid Identity: Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Ideas in Twenty-Five Years of Paintings, Prints, and Portfolios," Western Illinois University Annual Faculty Lecture 1997. Available at www.wiu.edu/users/mffgj/wiu/annlec95.htm.
** Cf. "Hybrid Identity." Jones's pioneer work with the computer has been recognized for many years. Mark E. Stegmaier commented on it in an essay on Jones in American Artist in February 1988. A reprint of Stegmaier's essay, an essay by Jerry Klein titled "Books and Portfolios," and another by Jones titled "The Artist and the Computer" appear in the Traveling Exhibition and Catalog 1991-1994 which accompanied a retrospective of Jones's work.
*** In Klein's "The Village," an essay written for the catalog for Village Memories, 1992.
**** A conversation with Fred Jones at our home on 7.23.00 in Ottawa, Illinois.
Fred Jones earned a National Diploma in Design in 1961 from Cardiff College of Art in Wales, G.B., plus an Art Teachers Diploma from the University of Wales, Cardiff, in 1962. In 1964-65 he earned a Master of Education degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1970-71 he attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, completing a Master of Fine Arts and specializing in Printmaking. In 1979, while on sabbatical, he attended the Atelier 17 in Paris and the Print Workshop in London. In 1987-88 he returned to the University of Wisconsin as an Honorary Fellow and studied Computer Graphics for a year. He joined the Western Illinois University faculty in 1968 as an instructor in Art Education, Drawing and Design after teaching for two years at Chester College of Art in England. Since 1971 Jones has developed the Serigraphy Program and the Computer Mediated Art program. In 1997 he was chosen as the Western Illinois University Faculty Lecturer of the Year. In 1999 he was awarded the Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Artist Award and was the campus nominee for the national award.
James Ballowe is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Bradley University. An award-winning essayist, poet, and editor, he currently teaches nature writing, literature, and ethics at the Morton Arboretum (Lisle) and the Field Museum (Chicago). He has been closely associated with Fred Jones in the development of two portfolios and has followed Jones's career for a quarter century. Ballowe is currently a member of the Illinois Humanities Council and the Illinois State Museum Board of Trustees and served on the Illinois Arts Council from 1975 to 1983.
The exhibition will be seen in the WIU University Art Gallery in January 2001, the Center for Contemporary Art, the Peoria Art Guild in July/August 2001, and the McLean County Art Center in January/February 2002.