Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Ralph Douglas Jones: Happy Fish Folk Artist”.
I’M ralph douglas jones, i’m an outsider artist, folk artist and confabulator of pieces and things i’m also a treasure hunter. That’S where i got all this stuff at his treasure hunt i mean: where do you find a gizmo like that, with antlers on it and and uh treasure hunting? I got up at they turned the century and i fired myself right off. I said you’re done, but the last year i was in business in the sign business. I had a big oak tree in my front yard. I was in greensboro north carolina on lee street close to uncg, and i put 35 000 worth of neon in this great big oak tree. It looked a little bit like a massage pollard. You know, art is supposed to evoke an emotion and it did. I never really thought about being in business or having a gallery or making money or anything. I was just making art, it was fun, i mean if you sold a bunch, you had enough to eat and buy gas. It was like great um, my really uh, my main medium is availability. That’S that’s what i work out of whatever is available that day, the two big, the big tank you see over here.
That was one of four tanks. I sold two of them to people for to use, and i made art out of one this fish right here see those two fish right here. That was a fence off the side of the road is what that was, and i stopped and got it and it had paint on it which made it really nice. It’S easy to paint wood, that’s already painted if you’re going to start from scratch, sometimes a little more challenging.
So i made a set of those. I think i made 55 or 60 out of that. You can hear them laughing out loud out here in the yard, because that’s what it’s all about is smiling happy well, this is my happy fish. It’S smiling so when i had the bus, i couldn’t really drive around very much because the bus is huge and uh.
The people across the street, her husband, had a transmission shop and they gave me an old van well. It was terrible, so i started painting with just the paint i had i kept running out, so it had a lot of colors on it. So i said well i’ll put my big fish on the side of it take up a lot of room. So i draw this big fish out. I get done it sort of looks like a shark, so i just reach down and give it a smile and the happy fish is born, and i have that picture inside offload for you, so uh really, my life is, is about uh recreating out of junk drug Addict alcoholic gambling addict recovered 25 years from all that stuff holy moly. What a mess that was.
You know i helped a lot of people so uh. So my i am actually recycled myself. I had crossed the line, but i couldn’t tell the truth from the faults and you move into a place where you just make up your own reality all the time. So it’s not good, but i got this out of it because i sit on the barstool and dreamed about stuff like this all my life and when i finally got it the good orderly direction, straightened out and got one foot in front of the other. Then things came in place. I’D love to find a 60 model jet airplane what’d, you do with it turn it into a fish.
You got to cut the wings off and remount them up here, get the tail off and move that over here. The fuselage makes a great eye. You got to sort of incorporate that in light it up uh the fins you take, the little pieces that are left over make fins off of the side of it mount it on two posts: oh it’d, be fun. .