Portrait of Painter Mel Jones  Painting gallery

I was born in 1932. During part of the war years I spent many happy childhood days on a farm, and developed a love for animals which has remained with me throughout my life. After leaving school I gained a degree in Dairying. I have worked in laboratories and milk bottling centres, factories, on farms, taught in schools and worked in psychiatric wards, with the elderly, with people who were physically disabled and those with learning disabilities. I spent two years training in dance, drama and movement, and during this time I made two particularly interesting in-depth studies. One was on the Finnish Epic poem, The Kalevala, from which I learned about Finnish shamanism; and the other was a multimedia project on the Yoruba culture , religion and sculpture in Southern Nigeria and neighbouring countries.
It was also at this time that I began to experiment with free painting and free verse. I was amazed to find that my discoveries of images arising from the unconscious correlated with those of C.G. Jung and other analytical psychologists who worked closely with him.They had found universal images occurring in the dreams, myths and folk tales of people throughout the world. This fascination with unconscious imagery led me to my own personal analyses, training in psychotherapy and then to private practice as a counsellor/psychotherapist. However after thirteen years of the latter I began to develop my leanings towards art and photography, with regard to which I have always been greatly influenced by the Blaue Reiter expressionists, especially Paul Klee, Kandinsky and Auguste Macke.
In the Millenium year I moved to Andalucía. For four years I lived in a high mountain village. I enjoyed the village life, found the rugged mountains awe-inspiring, loved the scent of herbs, the profusion in Spring of wild flowers , the house martins nesting in the eaves of my house, the sight on a clear evening of the Rif mountains of Morocco across the sea, and above all the music of hundreds of different goat and sheep bells and the clopping of mules walking past my house.
Now I have exchanged all this for a very different scenery, where there are cows, donkeys and sheep in lush green fields, for I have moved again , this time to a small town in Normandy where coppersmiths follow traditions going back to the middle ages, and where other ancient trades such as clock-making, the production of huge church bells and lace-making are still thriving.
I continue to develop my experimental techniques in making photomontages, using photographic images of buildings and the natural environment.
I have had exhibitions in the West Country of England, including the Theatre Royal in Bath, and my pictures have been exhibited various places in the Axarquía region of Andalucía.