SCULPTURES

Assessing his life’s work in old age, Jonah Jones concluded that he had had three discrete but connected careers: as a sculptor, an art educator and writer. He felt that he had made his main contribution to the arts through sculpture, and certainly it is in this field that he showed the greatest creativity and versatility.

Jonah can perhaps be regarded as belonging to the last generation of sculptors who worked mainly in stone. He saw himself both as an artist and – as the son of a coalminer – a workman, and he took great delight in the physicality of carving stone.

In another context, he once wrote that “the skill of hand is an amazing factor in happiness”. In his mind there was no division between the concept he was working on and the hard work of shaping the stone.

It was not only stone that Jonah carved, however; he did a relatively small amount of sculpture in wood, and for a while produced a series of small works in metal. His style evolved from classically figurative to abstraction. Some of his finest (and certainly largest) sculptural pieces are public works, to be found around Wales and England.