Growing Community Through Creativity

Doug Jones is a multifaceted artist from Jackson, MI whose practice encompasses everything from paintings and murals to video and garden architecture. Although his creative output manifests itself in different ways, it all stems from the same place – his dauntless creativity, and love for community.

Jones is a graduate of University of Michigan and currently is studying Print Media at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

 He works in a style he refers to as “Contemporary pointillism,” which takes classic style of pointillism, creating images using a collection of dots, and applies them to technology. These dot images can include Ben-Day dots, like those found in comics, or pixels in a computer screen. One example can be found in his mural titled “14,000 Dots’ at 427 W. Seven Mile in Detroit, in which Jones collaborated with local residents to paint a gradient of dots across an entire building façade.

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 Jones is currently working on a new public art project with Design Core Detroit and the City of Detroit, to design his first public garden. Jones
recalls early memories working in his grandmother’s garden, but it was after seeing the work of Piet Oudolf, the Dutch designer of the High Line Garden in New York City, that it clicked for Jones to make one of his own. Coincidentally, another Oudolf-designed, naturalistic public garden is opening in late August on Belle Isle.

 “It made me think of garden design in a whole other way. The designs felt more accessible to me.”

In Oudolf’s garden, Jones saw the flowers coming together to build a larger whole, just like the dots in his paintings. He plans to start work this month on the site, after being delayed more than a year due to the pandemic.

 “It’s going to take our garden three years before it reaches maturity—it’s going to look like a whole lot of nothing the first and second year. It’s about getting these plants established and watching them grow as well.” Jones says.

 “I’m really geeked over the next three months to walk through as many gardens as I can.”

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