Ellen Jones Original Watercolor.

12 1/2 in x 12 1/2 in

I will be listing 3 original watercolor paintings by Ellen Jones so please look at my other auction if you are interested. Thanks!

By Don Oldenburg

September 27, 1994

Ellen Jones did something a lot of people just dream about doing.

For those of us who wake up to discover we're compulsive artists trapped in the bodies of lawyers or waitresses or accountants, that revelation too often comes too late. We're already in our thirties or forties. Our muses go unrequited. If-onlys forever echo at the back of our minds.

In 1973, Jones had already chosen a career as a high school history and political science teacher. Raised in Prince George's County, she graduated from the University of Maryland majoring in education toward that goal. She married her high school sweetheart and soon established herself as a dedicated teacher at a private school in Virginia.

But in the early '70s, obviously pregnant teachers were asked to take a leave from teaching. "I assumed at the time that once Jake was old enough I would go back to the classroom," says Jones, 45. "Then Molly came along two years later, and that's about the time I was seriously pursuing art. Still, in my head I remember thinking I would go back to teaching."

Not that art had been her longing, her irrepressible desire since she couldn't remember when. In fact, other than one of those forgettable high school art classes, Jones had never tried her hand at it, never really thought about drawing, putting brush to paper. So it isn't at all clear why her husband, Tom Jones, came home from his communications consulting firm one evening and handed his expecting wife an oil-painting set.

"I guess he had an image of me home with the baby and painting ... to give me something to do," says Ellen Jones, now thankful for Tom's impulsiveness, even if oil painting is a difficult medium to start in. "My mother gave me a camera to take pictures of the baby and Tom handed me the oil painting set. I was stunned."

Jones tried anyway. Between changing diapers, during the baby's nap time, at night after everyone else had conked out, she faced off with an empty canvas. It wasn't love at first sight. She struggled to complete a few paintings -- nothing to inspire her to quit her day job, had there still been a day job.

“They were pathetic. Oh so bad," Jones says of her first experiments in oil. "I just looked at pictures in magazines. I was trying to learn the medium by reading the pamphlet in the kit. One was a feeble attempt at mountains and sunrise. If you have the wrong medium and it doesn't suit your temperament, no matter how hard you try you can't do it."

Frustrated, Jones signed up for a Fairfax County adult education class in oil painting. After looking at her work, the instructor recommended she put down the brushes and learn how to draw. She transferred into a drawing class and learned some basics -- her first introduction to the hard lines of graphite and ink rather than the softness of a brush's fine sable.

Another thing she learned in the class was that she didn't want to be just a weekend dabbler whose Monday-to-Friday frustrations played out into unsatisfying images on paper. She didn't want to be just another mother who in a few hours of painting classes Saturday mornings when the kids were at soccer could never quite capture her emotions in a brush stroke. She wanted to be an artist whose work sells in galleries and hangs in other people's homes, a professional artist whose work is valued and collected.

"There are people who paint for the pleasure of keeping the works and giving them to family members," says Jones. "I figured it's a business, I turned it into one, and everything has a price tag on it."

Mostly self-trained, working in a mixed media of pen-and-ink and watercolor, by the end of the '70s Jones began turning out enough paintings to peddle at art fairs and community shows almost every weekend, even to enter in juried shows. "There'd be what you call your shopping center shows," she recalls. "You'd walk in with a couple of shopping bags of pictures, they'd set up your works on racks and you'd leave. It was so easy; you'd pay $5 a work and put in a few hours."

"Once I got a pen in my hand," she says, "it obviously suited me. I've always been a stickler for detail."

Already her paintings displayed what has since become her trademark rustic style and architectural images -- historic 18th- and 19th-century buildings, bare branches of trees lining winter streets and reaching toward gray cloud-woven skies.

With Matthew's birth, Jones was raising three youngsters in the early '80s while simultaneously raising her personal and financial investment in her artwork. When she was vanning the children to soccer games, husband Tom manned the booths at that weekend's art fair. To give legs to her increasingly popular originals, she began making limited-edition lithographic prints, some hand-painted afterward.

Her distinct historic Maryland and Virginia focus gradually built a regional following. Her red-brick scenes from Old Town Alexandria, the Fairfax County Courthouse, pre-Civil War churches, Monticello, townscapes of Clifton, Occoquan and Williamsburg, Shenandoah Valley landmarks, all finished with earth-toned watercolors, conveyed the feel of American heritage, Jones never again got around to teaching in a classroom.

When we would travel on the Eastern Shore, taking the kids on rides, and you see those old houses out there abandoned in the marshes, you don't have to appreciate history to see the beauty of the barrenness and the sky," says Jones. "I just love painting old buildings, the older the better."

Seated on an antique wicker rocker on the front porch of the gallery she opened two years ago on Chapel Road in tiny Clifton, Va., Jones says art has enabled her to do exactly what she wants to do. The Clifton Gallery, a blue two-story former slave-kitchen-turned-barber-shop, is now the primary showcase for her work. On its walls hang some of her original paintings, the large ones priced between $1,500 and $2,500, and the limited edition lithographs that range from $15-$90, higher if a watercolored print. And between tasteful craftwork hangs prints of other local and nationally known artists, including a large collection of Civil War and other military art.

Meanwhile, Jones moved into one of her paintings. A time-warp 19th-century town hidden in rich rolling farmlands east of Manassas, Clifton's been a subject of her precise pen-and-inks for 20 years. The Joneses bought and renovated an idyllic 1917 farmhouse that they now live in just outside of town. The farmhouse is a tangible gauge for Jones of her success as an artist.

“Financially, I probably am just where I would be if I were teaching," she says. "But right now I have flexibility of schedule where I can be there for my kids, and I still can do all this renovating and all the things I want to do. I still sometimes yearn to be back in the classroom, but I now have my own schedule."

Scurrying last week to prepare for a weekend art show, and with the annual arts and antique fest of Clifton Days coming Oct. 9th, Jones says she wants to do fewer shows and emphasize the gallery more. "The gallery is doing real well," she says. "After 20 years it might be time to quit the shows. ... The art gods have smiled on me."