Biography

"A person has to have some work to do, so I carve some and play the fiddle." That's been S. L. Jones's philosophy since 1967 when he turned to his youthful hobby of whittling after his first wife's death and his retirement from forty-five years with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. Using his Bowie knife, Jones first carved miniature figures and animals from the local yellow poplar, walnut, and maple he gathered in the woods. Wood chisels proved more practical when he began to carve life-size busts of people and heads of animals from hardwood logs. Table-top freestanding figures, singly or in groups, began to appear in the mid 1970s. A similar evolution marks his surfaces—from unpainted early carvings in the late 1960s to the introduction of paint, stain, and penciling around 1972. By the mid 1970s, Jones used opaque paint to embellish his sculptures.