Jones House Community Center Boone North Carolina

The Jones House, one of downtown Boone’s landmarks, will be 100 years old in 2008, and the Centennial Celebration events will be launched with the release of a Jones House painting by the well-known and highly respected local artist Richard Tumbleston. Limited edition giclée prints of Tumbleston’s painting, Evening Glow, will be available at the Jones House Community Center when it reopens for the holiday season on Friday, November 23, 2007.
Tumbleston’s painting captures the wintertime beauty of the stately white house, which was built in 1908 by Dr. J. Walter Jones. In 1983 the Town of Boone bought the house, and it became known as the Jones House Community Center. It now also is home to the Watauga Arts Council’s galleries and offices.
Evening Glow is an acrylic painting, and the giclée prints have been created with a precise reproduction process that captures a wide range of colors and details from the original painting. Giclées on paper will be available in the following limited numbers: 190 prints 13” x 19 ½” and 290 prints 8” x 12”. Twenty-five 20” x 30” giclées on canvas will also be available. Either framed or unframed prints may be purchased. The larger giclées on paper will be offered at a special precelebration price for the remainder of 2007.

The Evening Glow prints will also be available at Tumbleston’s studio-gallery (call 264-7147) and, through this December 31, at the Wilcox Emporium in Boone (262-1221). Framed prints are also available through WAC’s Art Placement Service at Remax Realty Group in Shoppes at Shadowline and Blue Ridge Lifestyle Properties at Winkler’s Creek Crossing, and beginning November 23 at the Jones House Community Center in downtown Boone (262-4576). Proceeds from the sales through Watauga Arts Council’s Art Placement Service will further the Art Council’s programs and activities.
The opportunity for the Jones House Community Center and Tumbleston to launch this special collaborative effort took both parties by surprise. Tumbleston explains: “Three or four years ago, I began exploring the possibility of doing a painting of the Jones House. On cold snowy mornings I would go over to King Street and photograph the landscape, all the time considering the angle, and time of day—even though I didn’t have any painting in mind yet.
In 2006, I decided it was time to paint that old house on the hill in downtown Boone that I had been paying so much attention to during the last several years. That turning point happened after I’d returned to experiments with acrylic paint in September 2006. I hadn’t worked in acrylic since the early 1970s during my college days, when my paintings were abstract. After doing a dozen or so acrylic paintings, most of which were landscapes and animals from the Rocky Mountains and six Native American images, the Jones House painting started to take shape in my mind’s eye.”

And the surprising turn of events? “While nearing the end of the painting process,” Tumbleston says, “I was delighted to learn in a conversation with Cherry Johnson, the Jones House Community Center director, that the Jones House will be 100 years old in 2008. As it turned out, the Center’s board was interested in having a Jones House Centennial Commemorative Limited Edition, and I’m honored that the giclée prints of my painting have been designated for this special purpose.”

When asked how he chose an approach to the Jones House for Evening Glow, Tumbleston explains, “The sky is usually painted first in my landscapes, and this sky felt more like evening than morning. I was reminded of all those early winter evenings when the clouds are low over Boone and the glow of the lights in the houses warms the chill of winter. That evening glow somehow seems to shorten the cold, snowy season in Boone.”

Richard Tumbleston has been living near Boone since 1979. During that time, the artist has developed techniques in watercolor, dry brush watercolor, egg tempera, gouache, alkyd oils, and acrylic. He holds degrees in studio art and religion. While completing a master’s of divinity degree, he studied the relationship between the arts and religion while also focusing on psychology and family systems therapy. He began painting full-time after receiving that degree. His art takes on the impressions of finely painted landscapes, detailed still-lifes, or portraits, and undercurrents of his formal studies often flow in abstract dimensions throughout his subject matter and representational compositions.

Special editions of Tumbleston’s paintings have benefited the South Carolina Division of the American Cancer Society, the Watauga County Hunger Coalition, the Boone Chamber of Commerce Tree Planting Project, the Ashe Civic Center, the North Carolina 4-H Youth Development, and River Network in conjunction with the Madison-Gallatin Wild Trout Foundation. Tumbleston was appointed by the Watauga County Board of Commissioners to serve as the official artist for the county’s Sesquicentennial, celebrating Watauga County’s 150th birthday. The Carriage House at Cone Manor reproduction was released in 2000, in collaboration with the Blowing Rock Stage Company, to benefit the Blowing Rock Community Arts Center.

The Jones House Community Center invites everyone to join in the first of many Centennial Celebration events by coming to see the limited edition giclée prints of Richard Tumbleston’s Evening Glow on November 23. At noon that day, the Center will reopen, decked out in its holiday best.

Tumbleston will also be on hand at the Watauga Arts Council Gallery Reception in the Jones House Community Center Friday, December 7 from 6:30-8 p.m. The reception is part of the Downtown Boone Art Crawl.