-When I have a brush in my hand,
I feel as though I'm in the right place somehow.
That it's not that nothing can go wrong
because everything can go wrong.
And that simply doesn't bother me.
I think one of the best things about working as long as I have,
doing sort of the same thing every day,
is that it's -- there are only few moments
when things are totally blessed by the muse.
It's so out of your control.
Oops. I'm actually at my best when things are going wrong.
♪♪
My name is Fay Jones and I'm a painter,
and I have been a painter for a long time.
I've been told that I'm a narrative painter,
and I think that's fairly accurate.
Painting has become my basal metabolism.
It's part of what I need to do.
And I will be 88 in June, and I'm fine with that.
But I also can't quite believe I've reached
that point in my life.
This -- it's just the idea of being my age and feeling
that I'm fading in some way.
Not in a bad way, that you feel invisible.
Guess I'm addressing the issues
of being an almost 88 year old woman.
How's that? [ Laughs ]
This is a photograph of me as a very young child.
It's 1937, so I would have been a year and something.
I'm the oldest of six children.
I've always been able to spend a lot of time by myself.
I think I'm a master of staring into space,
and I feel extremely fortunate that I grew up in a generation
where that was perfectly all right.
If you finished your schoolwork,
you could just look out the window.
I read a lot as a child,
and I also drew a lot as a child from a very young age.
And I wanted to be an artist, but had no idea what that meant.
When I went to art school,
I was 17 and I got into Rhode Island School of Design.
I was able to be completely self-centered for four years.
It was great.
Then I got married at the end of the fourth year
and by the time I graduated, I was pregnant.
We moved to Seattle from Providence, Rhode Island in 1960
with two children and a basil plant. [ Chuckles ]
And my husband had a job teaching
at the University of Washington.
I got out of school in 1957,
and I didn't actually exhibit until 1970.
So I painted very small, because I had four children.
The maximum dimension of my paintings
at that time was probably 15 inches.
I took over the biggest room in our house
and started painting paintings
that were at least six feet tall.
So, everything changed.
[ Indistinct chatter ]
-Well, this is studio e gallery.
Our current exhibition is a collection
of new monoprints by Fay Jones.
Being an inhabitant of the city of Seattle,
there's no way that I would not have known
who Fay Jones is as the artist.
Fay is probably our most important painter in the region.
Her imagery is known by people who don't even know her name.
Fay's work is in the subconscious
of a lot of people in the area.
♪♪
-I think I have a habit of recycling certain images.
That figure, and this was 34 years ago,
the gambler image I'm still working on 34 years later.
Those are probably the first two that I did.
The rabbit for me is a humorous symbol of fecundity.
I love the monkeys. [ Chuckles ]
They're funny and we're related to them.
The donkey is a beast of burden.
And I've always sort of felt with a donkey was, in a way,
sometimes being a woman, it's like being a donkey
or in a way, a beast of burden.
I'm not sure I'm a feminist,
but the alternative is unthinkable.
At some point,
I realized I didn't have to prove anything.
You know, I didn't have to prove that I knew what I was doing
from the beginning to the end of a painting.
I used to feel you had to cover up your history.
♪♪
I realized the history is part of the painting.
-You know, often there's a shadow of
where that arm first was drawn or where that,
you know, angle was.
Or maybe this thing that was masked out.
You can leave that -- she leaves the trail because I think,
in her words, the path is as interesting as the destination.
And you can see it here.
I mean, look how many donkey legs this has. [ Laughs ]
♪♪
-It's really how I process whatever's coming in.
I think I am best suited to
sort of taking it out on a piece of paper.
Ah, good. That's a relief. [ Chuckles ]
It has to come from inside, you know.
That's the hard thing to explain to people.
Better. [ Laughs ]
♪♪
Ten years ago, I painted small watercolors
that were based on still photographs
of Jean Renoir films.
And I always wanted to make a big painting of it.
Unlike a lot of other work that I've done,
I've had someplace to go every day.
I really wanted to paint this painting.
So I gave myself an assignment.
You hear writers say, "I'm not going to write anymore."
Some do and some don't.
It's just possible that one day you'll wake up and say,
"That's it."
Something happens, and there you are.
You're back in the studio and say...
I don't know what I'll take up when I decide I can't do it.
Maybe I'll try knitting again. [ Scoffs ] I don't know.
♪♪
-See more of Fay's work at studio e gallery
in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood,
and online at James Harris Gallery.
♪♪
Catch Art Zone, Friday nights at 8 and anytime online at seattlechannel.org/artzone