Grahame Jones, 1952-2020
An Appreciation by Patrick Eyres, February 2024
Born and bred on Tyneside, Grahame Jones studied art in Nottingham. While a part-time printmaking lecturer at Bradford College of Art, he met Patrick Eyres and Ian Gardner. Realising that they had so much in common, Gardner suggested that they all worked together. To this end, he managed to have them included in his invitation to contribute to the contemporary section of The Viewfinders exhibition at Abbot Hall art gallery, Kendal. With the benefit of hindsight, their tour of the Lake District in January 1980 brought together the triumvirate that would launch the imprint New Arcadians (later the New Arcadian Press) in May 1981 through the exhibition, Mr Aislabie’s Gardens, at the Cartwright Hall art gallery, Bradford, The New Arcadians imprint succeeded The Blue Tunnel, which was the small press run jointly by Anne and Ian Gardner since 1973.
Grahame was quietly passionate about watercolour painting and totally committed to his art. He was in awe of the watercolourist he regarded his predecessor, John Sell Cotman, as well as Francis Towne. He exhibited intermittently around the country and was represented in London for a time by the Francis Kyle Gallery. Although one of the three co-founders of New Arcadians, he lived at a distance from the epicentre in Leeds, first in Blaydon, on Tyneside, and later in Nottingham. He participated in the principal New Arcadian exhibitions, including the launch show, Mr Aislabie’s Gardens (1981), as well as A Landscape Explored at the Devonshire Arms, Bolton Abbey (1984), The First Decade at the Leeds Polytechnic Gallery (1990-91), now Leeds Beckett University, and Landscapes Encounter’d at the University Gallery Leeds (1996), now the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery.
Involvement in the New Arcadian adventure led to visits to Little Sparta and friendship with Ian and Sue Finlay. He joined the ranks of Finlay’s collaborators. He also participated in the letter-writing campaigns of The Little Spartan Wars. This was the collective title for Finlay’s wars of principal with various bureaucracies during the 1980s. He also took part in the, now legendary, First Battle of Little Sparta of February 1983, which repelled the attempt by the local authority’s bailiff to seize artworks from the garden temple, whose rating was the subject of dispute. On occasions, he stayed at Little Sparta to keep the poet company. This was during The French War of the late 1980s, while Sue Finlay was away in Paris to participate in press conferences, meet with their lawyers and attend the court hearings.
Music was a passion akin to painting. He was particularly enamoured with the works of Beethoven and shared this enthusiasm with another New Arcadian participant of the early 1980s, John Tetley. Grahame was also a devotee of English music and song of the early 20th century. It was this that led him, in the pre-internet days of 1980, to scour the reference department of Nottingham Central Library to obtain a photocopy of the lyrics to Linden Lea. Written by the Dorset poet, William Barnes, and first published in 1859, it was set to music in 1901 by Vaughan Williams. Grahame was determined that, during the 1980 tour of the Lake district, the trio would serenade, albeit from a distance, the week-old Linden Heather Eyres. The tape recording of our conversations confirms the gusto of this celebration.
Such was his pleasure in music that he undertook forays into the equivalence between compositions and places. This culminated during the mid-1990s in his ‘musical boxes’ of wood and watercolour. His association with the New Arcadian Press challenged him to translate the graphic sensibility of his watercolour painting into monochrome drawings. The themes of certain editions of the New Arcadian Journal enabled Grahame to transfer the spirit of his ‘musical boxes’ into book illustration. These were graphically evoked and applied to visualise the idea of ‘Arcadian’, ‘Acadian’ and ‘Cajun’ in A Cajun Chapbook, NAJ 33/34 (1992), as well as to invoke specific types of English landscape in Landfall, NAJ 41/42 (1996).
Inspired by The Silbury Treasure (1976) and The Avebury Cycle (1977) by Michael Dames, Eyres and Jones walked the Wiltshire downs to explore the neolithic presences of monumental stone and earthworks as well as the Georgian tree clumps that marked downtop locations. They were sometimes accompanied by Grahame’s partner, Caroline Nix, and usually camped on The Ridgeway above Avebury, having reflected on the day’s exertions over a pint or two of Wadworth 6X in The Red Lion. The explorations generated many watercolours for Grahame’s exhibitions. Yet, despite their ambition, the Wiltshire Series of New Arcadian publications was only fragmentarily realised in print through Sumer Is Icumen In, NAJ 5 (1982), The Wansdyke Cards (1982-83) and in Landfall, NAJ 41/42 (1996).
At the same time, also in the late 1970s, Jones joined Eyres in his exploration of the lost Georgian landscape garden of Hackfall, which was concealed in the overgrown amphitheatre of the three-hundred-foot-deep gorge of the River Ure. Once again, these walks generated watercolours for exhibition, especially Mr Aislabie’s Gardens. Another outcome was the small book, Hackfall: A Secret Garden (1981), whose poems and imagery evoked the romantic ruination of the place.
Gradually his graphic pastorals became infused with the suggestion of science fiction. However, in the late 1990s, he chose to step back from creating watercolours for exhibition and commission in order to re-focus on teaching at a Further Education Key Skills College in Nottingham. He realised that he could use his artistic expertise to help his teenage students develop their own creative and transferable skills. This proved to be so rewarding that, during 1998-99, he re-trained by completing a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education to further this work, and he went on to become the Course Tutor. He died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack in May 2020.
