Paula Jones

My Art is My Journey | My Journey is My Art

I was 45 years old when I picked up a paintbrush for the first time.

Before that, I had already been a nurse, worked in agriculture, sold real estate, designed and remodeled homes, raised a family, and lived a few different lives.

Then I started painting.

And I never stopped.

I began traditionally, mostly in oils, painting what I could see. Over time, the work changed. So did I.

I became less interested in painting what something looked like and much more interested in painting what it felt like.

That is still what drives my work.

I paint the invisible stuff.

Love. Fear. Grief. Freedom. Memory. Relationships. Becoming. The strange, messy experience of being human.

My work is intuitive and layered. I rarely know exactly where a painting is going when I begin. I make a mark, respond to it, cover it up, uncover something else, walk away, come back, and keep following the painting until it feels finished.

Sometimes I understand a painting immediately.

Sometimes it takes me months.

Sometimes someone else sees something in it that I never saw at all.

I love that.

I don’t believe art needs to tell people what to think or what to feel. I want there to be room in my work for the person standing in front of it.

Over the years, curiosity has become one of the most important parts of both my art and my life.

I ask a lot of questions.

Especially:

How do you know?

That question has opened more doors for me than certainty ever did.

These days, I think of myself as a Weaver. I notice threads—between experiences, people, memory, emotion, coincidence, creativity—and I follow them.

Sometimes with paint.

Sometimes with words.

I published my first book in 2014, and in 2026 I published Behind the Fucking Curtain. Writing has become another way I explore many of the same things I have always explored on canvas.

More than twenty years after I began painting, I am still changing.

Still experimenting.

Still questioning.

Still ruining perfectly good paintings and occasionally turning them into something much better.

And still deeply curious about what might happen next.

My art is my journey. My journey is my art.