Name Barbara Jones | Role Artist | |
Just when i needed you most barbara jones
Barbara Mildred Jones (25 December 1912 – 28 August 1978) was an English artist, writer and mural painter.
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Biography
Barbara Jones was born in Croydon, Surrey. She attended Coloma Convent Girls' School, and Croydon High School. Subsequently she attended Croydon School of Art before studying Mural Decoration at the Royal College of Art.
During World War II Jones was associated with the Recording Britain project of the Pilgrim Trust while the War Artists' Advisory Committee also purchased a work by her. Postwar, Jones created murals for the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition, the 1947 Enterprise Scotland exhibition, and for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition. She also worked for P&O, creating murals for the passenger liner ships SS Orcades, SS Oronsay, SS Orsova and SS Oriana, as well as for hotels, restaurants, exhibitions and schools.
Jones also worked on the children's television series The Woodentops. Most of the works, because of the nature of where they were created, have now disappeared. However many books containing her artwork remain, in the form of dust-jackets and illustrations.
In 1951 Barbara organised Black Eyes and Lemonade, a Festival of Britain related exhibition of popular and traditional art at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Jones was a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA), editing the society's journal from 1951-1953. In 1969 she was made the society's Vice-President. She was also a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a member of the Society of Authors.
She was said to belong to that group of Royal College of Art artists and illustrators, more well-known than she, who were her contemporaries: John Piper, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious and Edward Ardizzone. When she was at Croydon High School she made friends with a girl called Joyce Drew who later became architect and town planner Jane Drew, and it seems they influenced each other in their careers: Jane said they stayed friends.
She married the artist Clifford Barry whom she had met while at the Royal College of Art. The marriage did not last long and they did not have any children.
In 1999 the Katharine House Gallery in Marlborough held a sale of her studio works.