I first started painting in 1986 after being a very keen photographer (why are photographers always described as "keen"?) for more than 20 years and having amassed a very large collection of colour transparencies.

The spur to paint came from seeing a series on Channel 4 featuring the celebrated art forger, Tom Keating.

Each week Keating would produce a pastiche of a work by a well-known artist and one of these pastiches was a variation of a Degas painting in pastel.

I had previously tried to paint with oil pastels but had failed miserably. Tom Keating made it look so easy that I tried it again and found that pastel was a medium that suited me.

I subsequently found that soft pastels were a lot easier to use than oil pastels and after a brief period of experimenting with rendering textures such as wood, metal and glass, I concentrated more and more on painting landscapes.

I now paint in watercolour, pastels and acrylic. My choice of medium is largely dictated by the subject matter. If surface texture is paramount then I would probably choose pastels - if I want to obtain a wide tonal range then acrylic is likely to be my choice and if I want to produce a highly detailed drawing, watercolour would give me the opportunity to do this most effectively.

Watercolour is a very difficult medium to master but it is very exciting as a result. Acrylics, once the technical issues such as keeping the paint from drying so quickly have been mastered, provide the ultimate in control over the subject, giving you the option of a major change of direction if you are unhappy with a composition. I used acrylics in my abstracts to produce translucent glass and jewels and had a lot of fun doing this

Pastels give a richness of texture and colour together with an immediacy which is very satisfying - you don't have to wait for the paint to dry!

A Little bit about myself

I live in Bracknell in Berkshire and have recently retired from a long career in Marketing based in Malvern in Worcestershire.

Initially my landscape subjects were roughly divided between the Malvern area and the Thames Valley although my portfolio includes examples of landscapes and cityscapes ranging from Boston and Philadelphia in the USA and France, Switzerland and Sweden.

Name: Roderick Martin Jones

Born at an early age in Zimbabwe. (Very early)

Married with two children - well, grown ups really but "married with two grown ups" sounds a little bit perverted doesn't it?

Black Belts in To Fu, Su Doku and Feng Shui

White Belt in Macrame with lacy bits

Member of the Wokingham Art Society , Crowthorne and Sandhurst Art Society and the Sunningdale Art Society

Past member of the Worcester Society of Artists

Formal Art Education.

My Art Teacher at school wore a dinner jacket and called me "Sir" - is that formal enough for you?

No he didn't really. His name was Robert Whitmore and one of his claims to fame was that he tought the Royal Academician, Ken Howard

In fact as far as appreciation of artists' works are concerned it should not matter whether they have had a formal art education or not since a painting is something that is complete in itself and should commuicate directly with the viewer.

People who need an artist's resumé before they can tell whether they want to enjoy or buy a painting are clearly missing something or are frightened by the avant garde nature of a painting which leads them to a search for some mystical reassurance that the artist has a "proper" provenance.

Imagine if Mark Rothko was found to have been just an incompetent painter and decorator without any qualifications or that Marcel DuChamp turned out to be a sanitary engineer!

Hopefully the paintings shown on this site will tell you more about my qualifications than the following report on my work by one of Britain's leading Art Critics :

"Rod's approach to his work demonstrates a single-minded focus in his manner of using overlays of rich colour to depict still life, land forms and harbour views as a way of presenting a visual reading of his subject which is uniquely informed by his appreciation of the metaphysical pantheon of the cerebral paradigm of the post-modern ethos and imbued with a holistic one-ness of spirit which is sadly all too rare.

Rod shows an engagement with the medium in the manner of the marks which he makes to both underpin the main structure of his paintings and create inner tensions within the framework of the concepts represented by the underlying themes which are held within the fulcrum of the overlayering creative process.

The whole oeuvre is suffused with lighting that is depicted in strong visual terms across the chosen substrate of his work, be it paper, canvas or board, transforming occasionally mundane aspects of everyday life to a theistic embodiment of a higher plane.

His paintings provide the eye with an evanescent heuristic to enable it to encompass and enjoy a strength of recognition of the items depicted which is characteristic of his strongly post-modern approach to the objects depicted within and between the juxtapositions of themas chosen as the amphitheatre of his creative aspirations."

- Sir Stafford Stiffsocks RA

So that's clear, isn't it?

Actually, as you will probably have guessed, this is a spoof but the sad fact is that it is based on a real piece of squirm-inducing art-speak which has merely been taken to a higher level of pretentiousness for comical effect. I don't wish to embarrass the perpetrator of the original but I am sure that a dedicated Googler will be able to find the source by Googling some of the choicer phrases - try"using overlays of rich colour to depict still life" (include the quotation marks).

Other interests:

Photography: Where my interest in painting all started.

Optical Illusions. Optical illusions have always fascinated me - after all they are all about perception and the use of perspective, tone and shadow in paintings is nothing if not a practical application of optical illusion.

Walking: Apart from keeping me fit, it provides me with a constant source of inspiration for a steady stream of new landscape paintings.

Swimming (one mile every morning at the Bracknell Sports Centre) - I really do want to keep fit.

Deflating pretentiousness and pomposity in all its forms. (See above sample) and click here for a comprehensive guide to business speak and other pretentious piffle.

Playing blues

Musical Tastes : Mainly Blues but ranging over all its forms from early US folk blues through soul to Chicago blues and beyond. More about blues