About Me — Christopher P Jones

I’m a writer on art and history… and I’m a painter too

From a young age, I knew I wanted a different sort of life. I grew up in a sleepy English town with a close family, but when it came to how I saw my own life in the future, I didn’t gravitate to the typical family and career path.

I wanted something else. I wanted to live and know what else was possible. I also wanted to travel.

When I was growing up, I discovered I had a talent for drawing and painting. I went on to study art through school and college and began visiting galleries and reading books about art and artists like Rothko and Kandinsky. Soon enough I was hooked. To be creative and travel, what a prospect! By the time I was ready to enter the world of work I had an aspiration to make a living as an artist — following dreams of never having a “real” job but being creative all day, every day.

I painted and drew daily in my early twenties, having been to university to study Maths and Philosophy. Then one day I looked around me and noticed I had enough paintings to put on my first exhibition. My old art teacher happened to own a gallery, and when I found out I could hire it and hang my own paintings inside, I rolled up my sleeves and leaped on the chance.

If you’ve ever mounted an art exhibition, you’ll know that the common practice is to stick a little red dot onto the work, just in the corner, if you’re lucky enough to find a buyer. It’s a subtle marker that tells everyone that this painting is sold.

Well, as my two-week exhibition wore on, I began to get more and more of these red stickers. By the end of the exhibition, to my great surprise, I’d managed to sell over half of the paintings on display.

Using the proceeds from those sales, I decided to go traveling with a friend. We took a plane from London to St Petersburg, crossed Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express, zigzagged our way down through China, and then flew to America where, joining more friends, we purchased an old Chevy van and drove a meandering 12,000-mile route from one side of the country to the other, west coast to east.

I returned feeling triumphant. I wanted to know what the creative life would bring next.

Still, it wasn’t all plain sailing. All through this time, my fledgling career as an artist ebbed and flowed, rose, and dipped. I managed to sell more artwork but I wasn’t always confident I was on the right track. I sometimes found myself listening to those voices that said being an artist was too unrealistic to ever come to anything. It was the same voice that told me I should just think of painting as a hobby and find a proper job. The stigma of becoming a cash-strapped artist was starting to loom…

Important influences

Facing misgivings, a few key influences shaped me around this time and inspired me to resist the doubts.

I read Albert Camus’ existential novel The Outsider, and just as importantly for me, his book The Myth of Sisyphus.

From these two books I took the lesson that no matter how strange and unreasonable life could be, it was possible to find purpose by treating life as a uniquely personal situation. Happiness was not to be achieved but rather it was to be created, imagined, and enriched by choice and inner invention.

I also began listening to the music of Leonard Cohen. I found in Cohen’s tectonic voice and rich lyrics a poetic refutation of ordinary life. His personal story, of moving to a Greek island and struggling to make a living as a poet before taking the unlikely but eventually fruitful decision to become a singer, presented the sort of narrative tale that I respected. It perpetuated in me an archetypal story, that of a creative being disappearing into the world in order to see and explore a deeper mode of experience.

Influences like these showed me a way of leading a life, the most important characteristic of which was to pursue my own pathway and to do so with patient confidence that, given enough time, I would find my true way.

Writing beckons

The other creative calling always in the back of my mind was to write.

Alongside, my artistic efforts I always loved to write, filling countless notebooks and drafting several manuscripts on subjects like art, philosophy, and fictional stories.

Despite some success as an artist I was struggling to make enough money to live comfortably, so I decided to reappraise my options – which included getting myself a job. What can I say? It paid the bills.

More importantly, I took the decision to continue to feed my creative appetites and evolve them. Then within a short time, I gained some funding to embark on a postgraduate course. It changed my life.

My love of art and writing came together when I studied for a Masters in the History of Art. I was in the second half of my twenties at the time. The course was eye-opening and I learned a great deal. On its completion, the desire to become a serious writer took on new weight.

With several pieces written, I started to send pitches to publishers and newspapers. Most of them went nowhere. People around me remarked on how competitive it was and how writing should probably only be a pastime, just like my desire to become an artist. I can’t pretend it wasn’t frustrating at times, but needless to say, I carried on.

You might ask — what kept you going? A sense of conviction? The momentum of creative energy? Or knowing deep down it was what I wanted? Well, it was all those things. Never giving up is the best decision I ever made.

Making the Breakthrough

I persevered. In order to remain connected to my deeper ambitions I decided to try my hand at being self-sufficient and started a small business doing graphic design and web coding. Becoming an entrepreneur gave me the benefit of flexibility and saw me through some crucial years when I was studying and developing my writing.

Then, at the right time, I arranged a sabbatical from my design business. In hindsight, it was a pivotal decision.

I wrote and wrote, published, and promoted. I researched the many aspects of writing and publishing, set goals, taught myself how to use writing software, and used my experience from running my own business to develop my writing presence.

From that springboard — with foundations as old as my earliest creative urges — I began to gain some real traction.

It’s been a bumpy ride but with dedication and determination, I’ve kept learning along the way and found my feet.

Since then, I’ve published art exhibition reviews for museums and art magazines. I’ve authored and produced several books about paintings and art history, and have three historical novels to my name too. That’s not to mention the countless stories written on Medium!

The greatest pleasure is connecting with readers and helping them to get more from looking at art. People contact me and tell me how much my writing means to them. I’ve met some interesting and wonderful people.

All through, I’ve been open to new influences and have learned from new experiences. I’ve done some more traveling — to Japan, the Greek isles, Thailand, and Mauritius, and continued to write whilst visiting numerous European cities, especially across Spain — and slowly allowed myself to ripen into the person I am today.

Fortified by optimism, I remain excited about the future. I’m location independent which means I can write from anywhere! Things have turned out in a way I could have never imagined. And despite any setbacks along the way, it has all been worth it.

Christopher P Jones is the author of What Great Artworks Say, an examination of some of art’s most enthralling images.

To find out more about me and my books you can visit my website at chrisjoneswrites.co.uk