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Jean's affinity with Dartmoor began in the 1930s when her father, as prescribed by his doctor, rented Warren Cottage on the nearby coast, to treat his wounds from the Battle of the Somme. The National Park would later become a pivotal space in Jones's life, resonant both in her art and as a means of escape from the cities where she lived.
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Jones’s work is deeply engaged in the significant places of her life, in particular her surroundings in Primrose Hill, Oxford and the Devon countryside. She was remarkably uninterested in the exotic. Her art practice was in large part about achieving new levels of closeness to her immediate physical environment.
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The notable art critic, David Carritt, has described Jones “as an Expressionist, albeit a most restrained, unstrident Expressionist,” identifying in her work a characteristic array of “lyrical feelings – usually of happiness, sometimes of melancholy.” Jones’s work often features the same settings, which "she paint[ed] again and again, noting every change wrought by light and season but recording, too, the emotion which these changes awaken in her” and documenting “a world of becoming, not being”.
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Struggles with Mental Health
Throughout her life, Jones suffered from mental illnesses including bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety. Her difficulties with mental health severely limited the progression of her artistic career, and she was twice sectioned – with the GP on the occasion of her second sectioning describing her as "a woman who wears man's clothes".
Despite spending many of her later years in and out of hospitals and clinics, Jones would continue to paint and draw, both out of habit and as an opportunity for calm and reflection.
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