Not much is known about D. Paul Jones, who appears to have been an introverted artist. While his murals and paintings have survived in New Deal art collections across New Mexico, from Raton to Clayton to Santa Fe to Socorro, the artist’s life, it seems, was lived mostly off the record. Kathy Flynn, self-titled “lead detective” for New Deal art in New Mexico, paints Jones as a restless outsider, perhaps traumatized by military service in France during World War I, writing, “After the war, he took himself to Phoenix and worked in a bank but needed more solitude, nature and art, so he bought some art supplies and food and went into the wild of the Hopi and Navajo country. He learned all about these people, their country and customs and was given [a] Navajo name [meaning Little Dog] because of his gift for imitating animal sounds.”1
Jones reportedly went on to study at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, where he met Lloyd Moylan, eventually moving with Moylan in the early 1930s to Alcade, NM, where they shared a studio.
Available records indicate that the New Deal was the most active time in Jones’s career. His formal introduction to the Santa Fe art scene appears to have been through an exhibition of Federal Art Project (FAP) artists at the Museum of New Mexico,2 followed shortly thereafter by a revealing of his FAP mural, Founding of San Juan, The First Capitol of New Spain completed for the Spanish-American Normal School in El Rito, NM (now a campus of Northern New Mexico College). Contemporary reviews of Jones’s art were typically mixed. One reviewer of Founding of San Juan admired his landscapes while casting doubt on his figure-drawing abilities.3 Santa Fe artist and art critic Alfred Morang described Jones as tending toward a “gloomy color scale,” yet utilizing contrast effectively.4
Perhaps his failure to gain any real traction under the New Deal is why his career seemingly stalled at its conclusion. Jones continued to operate locally, so to speak, as a beloved Española Valley artist for the remainder of his life.
