Wood Sculptor and Jewelery

About E.R.Jones

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Edward Richard Jones

 

My name is Edward Richard Jones, I am one of seven kids born in Mount Holly N.J. In the seventh grade I started a photo club and developed

 

photographs as well as helping fellow class mates with photographic projects. In high school  I took pictures for the school newspaper, played

 

football, and ran track. I lived with a camera over my shoulder and took as many pictures as I could.  After high school my plan was to go to

 

Photography school but the government through the draft board said that photography school was a trade school and I would not qualify for a

 

college deferment of the draft.  I joined the Navy as my service and did a tour of duty in Viet Nam. I got married, had a son, and three years later

 

a divorce. Six years after ending military service I found myself living in Rhode Island and attending Rhode Island College.  I took as many art

 

courses as I could with metals and jewelry as a major. I discovered my love for sculpture in a required 3D sculpture assignment for a design class.

 

I was hooked. In only my second year at RIC I was asked if I could teach an after hour’s sterling silver jewelry making class at RIC. A few days

 

later I was asked to teach the same class at the University of Rhode Island.  For the next two years I spent one night at RIC and one night at URI

 

teaching classes. I only spent three years studying art in college and two of those years I helped instruct other artists. Economics forced me to

 

leave and get a job. I had responsibilities to my son, so I took a job as a Jewelry Designer for the next three years. The artist in me could 

 

not deal with changing my designs to save the department store buyers ten to twenty cents per piece at the sacrifice of good design. I took a job

 

as a stone setter and found that after a year I had just stopped doing my own art all together.  I traveled in the western states but returned to my

 

roots, staying with my mother in   New Jersey.   She is a master Crafter. She could figure out how an object was made and she would make it.

 

She talked me into sculpting a few things out of wood tosell with her own work at arts and craft fairs. She brought me back into a love of

 

sculptural expression. This is when I started carving figures and looking at other things I could carve. Two years after that I went to the Artful

 

Deposit Gallery in N.J. They took the sculpture I showed them and sold it.The rest is history, constant learning and experimenting, and a lot of

 

wood that ended up in the trash. I retired from working for others in 2013 and have been striving every day to make my work better. I'm working

 

with wood, sterling silver, copper, and brass. I express the beauty, emotion, experience, and creativity of life with these two hands.