Editing David Jones (painter) (section)

==Art==
Although Jones began exhibiting paintings in London galleries in 1919, his chief public creative expression was initially engraving. Soon after learning how to engrave, he entered the vanguard of the renewal of wood-engraving as an artform (instead of the reproductive craft it had been through most of the 19th century). He was among the first modern engravers to combine white-line and black-line engraving. His two acknowledged masterpieces of book illustration are ''The Chester Play of the Deluge'' (1927) and ''[[The Rime of the Ancient Mariner]]'' (1929). In both of these, engravings mirror one another in design and are arranged in the text to form a chiasmic structure. Jones would use this structure to give unifying symbolic form to his epic-length poem, ''The Anathemata''.<ref name="Colereidge"/>

His meager income came chiefly from painting, which evolved in style throughout his life. Breaking from art-school realism, he adopted the thick-boundary-line and sculptural style of Christian primitivism, which had affinity with the style of the London School. The dramatic landscape of Capel-y-ffin liberated him from fixed, stationary point of view. Having drawn maps during World War I, he reverted to thin-line "drawing with the point", which he had learned of from Hartrick. Painting the sea at Caldey Island and Portslade opened him to see water and sky as continuous, an active continuity that came to include the land. The subtleties of his mostly watercolour paintings after 1929 require patient and repeated viewing. In the 7 and 5 Society he was influenced by Winnifred Nicholson in painting freely, relying on more colour, less line, coming close to abstraction. After his first breakdown he painted ''Aphrodite in Aulis'' and two Arthurian paintings that, loaded with symbols, are "literary" in requiring "reading" as well as viewing. He longed to combine such multi-symbolic work with his earlier stylistic freedom. And he achieved such a combination in his painted inscriptions, which involve mostly ancient texts. In juxtaposing quotations, these inscriptions are modernist in aesthetic. Most are in Latin or Welsh because he wanted them viewed, not read. [[Saunders Lewis]] was the first to note that these inscriptions combine Jones's painting with his poetry. Union of symbolism with freedom is also achieved in his still-lifes of flowers in glass chalices. In undergoing so much change, Jones's visual art managed to be alive as only the new can. As a painter, he was, according to [[Kenneth Clark]], "absolutely unique, a remarkable genius".<ref name="Engraver"/>