There’s something truly captivating about a storm: the struggle between dark and light, rain versus sunshine and the way nature recovers after a storm. For a man like Western Illinois University Professor Emeritus Fred Jones, capturing these moments has been the pinnacle of his life’s work.
And for the public, they can see some of his work in its entirety at the YMCA of McDonough County in Macomb.
Born in the quiet border village of Llanymynech, Wales, Jones grew up amid rolling hills, shifting skies and the soft conversations of wind and stone — a landscape that would later become his lifelong muse. In 1968, he joined the WIU art faculty, where he taught art education, shaping generations of artists with the same reverence for observation and balance that defined his own practice. Though rooted in academia, his work always aimed for something older and more fundamental — the balance between showcasing Celtic paganism, Taoism and ultimate reality.
It’s about a dialogue between the visible and the invisible, where paint acts as a bridge between nature and spirit.
In his landscapes, nature never plays the role of mere backdrop — it breathes.
When dark storm clouds gather and roll into a sky of light, the shift feels less like conflict and more like a turning of the sacred wheel. Within the language of Celtic paganism, the storm and the calm are companions in an eternal cycle: destruction feeding renewal, shadow nurturing light. The rain does not wound the earth; it readies it for growth. In this rhythm, Jones captures nature’s pulse — the same pulse that once guided druids to honor the balance of all things.
In Taoist thought, this same transformation unfolds as the effortless movement of the Tao — yin giving way to yang, the dark to the bright, not in opposition but in harmony. The clouds pass because they must; the sky clears because it can. His work evokes the Taoist principle of wu wei — the wisdom of not forcing, of allowing the world to unfold in its own serene logic. The storm and the calm are simply two gestures of the same breath.
And when Jones paints those boundless blue days — skies wide and clean, with great white clouds drifting like thoughts across an uncluttered mind — he touches something deeper still: the essence of ultimate reality. The bright expanse becomes a metaphor for pure awareness, the eternal stillness beneath all change.
The clouds come and go, yet the sky remains. Here, nature becomes revelation — a quiet reminder that all form and feeling arise within the same vast, unbroken field of being.
His work is, in many ways, a meeting place of worlds — the wild heart of Wales and the measured calm of the Midwest; the scholar’s hand and the mystic’s eye. To look at his skies is to be reminded that teaching, too, is an act of renewal — that like the weather he paints, wisdom passes through us, reshaping what it touches. In every horizon he renders, there is both the memory of where he began and the timeless rhythm of what endures: the dance of shadow and light, earth and air, form and formlessness — the living breath between storm and sky.
Jones has other projects lined up that will be announced soon. In the meantime, his work can be seen at the YMCA, located at 400 E. Calhoun St.
