Retiree Marilyn Jones brings art to Garfield

Racks of oils, canvas, sketch books and pastels line the room.

Painting upon painting cover the walls.

Marilyn Jones has a full-sized painting studio in her home in Garfield. It is a live-in dream for the woman who moved here two years ago with her husband, Steve.

Jones, who had two paintings in a downtown gallery in New York City last January, is two years into retirement.

With alert eyes and a curious nature, Jones gets messy in the studio each day, mixing paints and colors.

Jones has yet to find a market for her paintings on the Palouse. Since she moved to Garfield, she has felt hampered in trying to paint more conservatively.

“I moved to Garfield, and my work got small-town,” Jones said. Lately she’s been trying to break out into more “outrageous” work, hoping to reach a freer, looser style.

She has two distinct series hanging in the studio at the moment. One is paintings of pictures she took of crucial film scenes, like “The Italian” or “The Virgin Suicides”.

The other series is her free-style series, where her personal style tends to come out in a twitchy, cryptic coloring of figures.

A wall of 15 notebook-sized paintings at one end of the studio depicts a woman suspended in the air, staring at the ground. The switch of her hips points to youth, although Jones can’t really say how old she is.

A manager at the gallery in New York City where Jones exhibited said she remembered Jones’ work as being fluid, yet subtle. One of two pieces, Girls with Towels, was particularly good, said gallery manager Bess Sobota at the Lana Santorelli Gallery.

“It’s so subtle and abstract in a way- yet the emotion really pours out of the canvas to me,” she said.

Marilyn and her husband Steve moved to Garfield in 2008 to be closer to their son Zach. They worked in property management in Oregon for seven years in the 1990s, then moved to Seattle, where they worked another eight years in property management. Both are originally from Oregon.

Jones plans to put her paintings on display on the Palouse but has yet to be accepted by a local gallery.

Jones said she began painting as a teenager, and painting was a way of establishing her own separate identity from her sister.

As the years went by, it also became a way to disengage from the toil of every day life, while still expressing herself.

“When I had bad things happening to me, I could kind of go to another world in paint. It’s help me get through all these years,” she said.

Painting has seen her through the death of her father, some trying years of her 40-year marriage, problems with their children and several other life obstacles.

“It’s just a mirror of what your inner self is telling you,” she said.