What I learned underpainting in burnt sienna for a year
I stopped reaching for white gesso last spring. The work got warmer, slower, and a little harder to start — which turned out to be the point.
Paintings and mixed-media works — landscapes carried from memory and portraits built up in layers. When she isn’t in the studio, she’s in the classroom teaching foundations and critique.
Works on view. Click a piece to open it.
Serica Jones is a painter and art school instructor working in acrylic and mixed media. Her work moves between memory-based landscapes and layered portraits — anything that can hold a story.
She began painting at a kitchen table in 2016 and now splits her weeks between making work and teaching. She’s most interested in the moment a painting “turns” — usually somewhere between the third and fourth layer — when a lesson from class meets an accident in the studio.
Recent work moves between two registers: quiet, distance-soft landscapes, and dense layered portraits that gather the textures of a life — flags, lace, sheet music, hair. Both are built with the same tools she teaches: drawing, edges, and patience.
A working record. Updated when something happens.
Short essays, mostly about process. Roughly monthly.
I stopped reaching for white gesso last spring. The work got warmer, slower, and a little harder to start — which turned out to be the point.
Where you put the horizon decides who the painting is for. A few notes from working through three sunset studies in one week.
Every piece in the studio has a small graveyard underneath it. I don't mind. It's where the painting learned what it didn't want to be.