Oil painter’s technique brings his woodland images to life.

The lush surfaces of Alan Jones’ paintings seem to invite touch.

On view at Gallery Fraga through February, the images of woodland near the artist’s south island home are so convincingly organic that one expects an extended fingertip to encounter moss.

The many layers of oil are built to replicate the energy of the growth of underbrush, foliage and bark, rather than merely duplicating the appearance.

“In layering the paint,” Jones said, “I’m trying to create the sense of energy of the things I’m painting.”

Using tiny brush strokes that are directional, not the dots of Pointillism, the painter seems to contruct his forests up from the cellular level.

In thousands of strokes, Jones lets the paintings “grow,” an unprogrammatic approach in which the work emerges through an ongoing dialog between creator and materials.

“The painting, literally, starts to paint itself,” he said. “I’m not so smart as to know what it’s going to look like when I start, and if I did, it wouldn’t be as much fun.”

Jones, who received his BFA from New York’s Pratt Institute and now makes his living in commercial banking, spends much of his free time out-of-doors, painting.

The artist – recently awarded two Ford Foundation grants to continue his studio work – begins with the technical challenge of stretching his large canvasses – typically 5 by 7 feet.

Jones gessoes the canvas before stretching it, and hangs it on the wall to dry, weighting it down so that it doesn’t buckle.

Pre-gessoeing means that the stretcher bars won’t warp as the expanse of canvas shrinks during the drying process.

Once the canvas is ready, Jones chooses a site near his home and lays out the large elements of the composition.

Although the specific images are local, the artist says that other scenes that he’s been storing for years also come into play, like the meadows he glimpsed from the train in upstate New York.

“A lot of this imagery has been with me for a long time,” he said. “To me they are like memory fragments.”

Flowing

In the same spirit of recycling, elements from past work resurface in his current show.

“If you were to go back in time 15 years, people would call them abstract,” he said. “For instance, I did a series of paintings that were very swirly. To me, they were like water currents. Those things have come into this work.”

Jones spends two to three months outside to establish a painting before bringing the canvas indoors to complete.

“To me, there’s no substitute for the immediacy of the real experience,” he said. “You can feel the temperature, hear the sounds, smell – almost taste – the air.”

The finished paintings are not conventionally pretty.

His strongest paintings feature bare, interlaced branches that nearly blot out the sky. Trunks are bilious with moss, forest floor dank with rotting foliage.

But there is a sense of barely contained movement and bursting vitality in the paintings that make a most convincing argument for intelligent interpretation.

An artist who painstakingly reproduced every needle, rock, root and tendril might get the details “right,” but Jones’ work both depicts and embodies the energy that is growth.

“When people look at them, they say ‘oh, it’s so detailed,’” he said, “but I don’t think of it that way. I’m trying to create life in the painting itself.”

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“Into The Woods” at Gallery Fraga displays oil paintings by islander Alan Jones.

Also featured are new wood pieces by Bainbridge artist and craftsman Cecil Ross. Included is a large dining table made from 1,000-year-old South African yellowwood that Ross designed and built with fellow island woodworker Alan Vogel.

The show runs through the end of the month. Information: 842-1150.