Frederick Jones has been making prints since 2005; he started in etching and mezzotint, but mainly now works in wood engraving. His subject matter revolves around the figurative and representational – faces, bodies in motion, cityscapes, effects of light and atmosphere. He loves especially windows, grids, and stairs which he sees as somewhere between metaphor and pars pro toto bits of the world of experience. Most of these media depend on line, and every print is an experiment with different ways of doing line. With wood engraving, the contrast between pure black and pure white allows all sorts of variations of contrast and sparkle, between clarity and blurredness of outline.
The main influences on Frederick’s work have been the atmospheric urban prints of artists such as Mikael Kihlman and Olesya Dzuraeva, but there is often a kind of echo of artists in other media: Gerhard Richter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Pierre Bonnard, Johannes Vermeer have been especially important to his work.
