Ghosts on the Strand, 2016, 39 by 36 inches, acrylic on Okawara paper.
Ghosts on the Strand, 2016, 39 by 36 inches, acrylic on Okawara paper. Courtesy of James Harris Gallery

Across the water, there's war, and war can swim. That's what Fay Jones knew as a girl, standing on the Atlantic beach of Massachusetts, looking toward Europe. That dark object that bobbed and then disappeared—was that a German submarine? The sailors came ashore in their uniforms, dressed to go right back out, floating even on land. It was the early 1940s, and Jones was a schoolgirl, spending her summers at the beach—anxiously, if her new paintings are to be believed.

The new paintings are showing at James Harris Gallery. This is a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, Jones has never been represented by Harris before, and he puts her in fresh new company, in a roster with fellow Seattle legends such as video pioneer Gary Hill, who like Jones destabilizes your sense of having a single perspective to look from, the ceramic sculptor Akio Takamori, also like Jones a colorist and a figurist (as is Claire Cowie, also at James Harris), and the adventurous semi-abstractionist Mary Ann Peters, whose grip on her own imagery, like Jones's, is always loose, always permissive so that it can live its own elusive life.

This one kills me. Its called Adrift. Very faintly, another woman reaches her arms out on the left side of the painting. What has happened or is happening?
This one kills me. It's called Adrift. Very faintly, another woman reaches her arms out on the left side of the painting. What has happened or is happening? Courtesy of James Harris Gallery

The other reason Jones's new show, Water, is a big deal is that it's her first solo in a few years, and Harris has turned over nearly the whole gallery to her. There are five large-scale paintings in the front room of the gallery, and then in a smaller, more intimate area in the belly of the gallery, Jones shows a very personal triptych.

First, the water pieces.

Jones uses only the slightest gestures to hint at the illusion of depth, to summon landscapes for her figures. The paintings are always so simple. It is enduringly surprising that they manage to be so mysterious at the same time.

This time, though, Jones's floating imagery moves toward a landing, as Harris said to me. The paintings hit ground at the shore.

There, they hit psychological and social issues, like the flight of refugees on boats in the families of all races in Coming Ashore. Where next? They stand completely still. Stuck, bizarrely perpendicular to a ballerina in a tutu lain across the bottom of the painting.

You go out on a limb when you say that Jones's paintings are "about" something, so I can only say what they raise up for me. When I see Women in Clouds, I see the three women in bathing suits encased in gray clouds like models frozen in amber. To a young girl, what did women, posed neatly for '40s beauty, do in a time of war?

One portrait makes fear itself look scary. A foggy-eyed girl runs from a zombie-eyed sailor with blue tattoos up and down his arms. She looks back to make sure he's not running after her, her whole body animated by paranoia. They're both Ghosts on the Strand.

The family portrait Adrift is an entire novel-ful of expressions, postures, positionings, dreamings. Is there a baby lying on an ocean floor? Is it alive? The woman hovering over it—its mother?—has nothing to offer it, only looks on with concern. Same for the father. Jones left two versions of his lower legs and feet, one parallel to the woman and baby, one grounded. Most eerie of all, there's a faint outline of another woman reaching toward the first. I like to think of some of Jones's characters as dreams of the others.

The openness of Jones's work has always kept me at something of a distance, which is probably the opposite of what she intended. I look at her giant mural in the bus tunnel at Westlake Station and I am glad it's there, but I don't feel personally attached.

That's the final reason why this show is a big deal: it does feel intimate. Maybe a little of it is just knowing that the Water series flows from a specific time and place, however imaginary my perception of that place is. But the other reason this show is personal is that Jones put up a triptych of exactly what she sees when she wakes and sits up in her bed each morning.

This is the view from the bed of Fay and Bob Jones. The sculpture on the right is one they own, by Akio Takamori. The painting on the left is a painting of a ukiyo-e print given to Jones by her mother. The trees are out the window.
This is the view from the bed of Fay and Bob Jones. The sculpture on the right is one they own, by Akio Takamori. The painting on the left is a painting of a ukiyo-e print given to Jones by her mother. The trees are out the window. JG

The sky in the middle is divided blue and pink, two seasons, two sides of the unseen bed. The trees are like rows and rows of an impatient audience waiting for the artists to rise and go about their day.

Their bedroom view is bounded by art in the literal sense. On the left, there's a Hiroshige print that Jones repainted here, including repainting its wooden mount. On the right, there's Jones's painted version of Akio Takamori's sculpted version of Goya's painted Duchess of Alba, cultures and time periods filtering each other, never resting. It's morning and the artist is awake, after all, and we are invited inside this time.