Vanessa Jones American

Vanessa Jones is a figurative painter whose self-portraiture explores mysticism, beauty, and transcendence through a sustained devotion to form. Drawing from her mixed American and Korean heritage, she weaves together Western art history and Eastern visual traditions, including Ukiyo-e prints, Joseon Dynasty imagery, and contemporary Korean culture. Working in traditional oil techniques, she engages the long lineage of the serpentine figure from classical contrapposto to Botticelli, constructing compositions that merge medieval philosophy, folklore, and myth. Her paintings inhabit a hyperreal space that feels less surreal than “a realism not of this world,” where metaphor often conveys deeper truths than literal representation.

Jones situates her self-portraits within the historical lineage of vanitas and the myth of Narcissus, interrogating the tension between surface and substance. Rather than centering autobiography, she treats the self as a cultural vessel—hovering between East and West, past and present—akin to a Silk Road Buddha or an Archaic Kore. Repetition allows her to move beyond likeness toward embodiment and idea, using her own image to explore conditions of desire, instinct, and collective memory.

Painting nearly life-size in oil on linen or board, Jones builds her works in layered stages, preserving the vitality of each mark while maintaining the material presence of paint. Though grounded in the techniques and limited palettes of the old masters, her practice acknowledges the digital age, drawing from photographic sources and an expanded chromatic range unimaginable to earlier painters. Through refined realism and mythopoetic atmosphere, Jones seeks what Roger Scruton termed the “quietly mystical”: images arresting enough to compel looking, and resonant enough to sustain contemplation.