Meet Alison Jones
Biography. Alison Jones is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist, printmaker, and healer whose work weaves together painting, drawing, surface design, and textile language into a deeply personal visual world, one shaped equally by the energy of New York City and the enduring influence of France, where she lived and worked during a defining chapter of her creative life.
Born in the United Kingdom, Alison earned her MA in Printed Textiles from the Royal College of Art before moving to Alsace, France where she worked as a Colorist and Stylist at DMC Texunion. There, she found herself both factory girl and fortunate apprentice — taken under the wing of a grande dame of French couture, a woman of formidable knowledge and high social standing who sent her traveling regularly between the workshops of Alsace and the ateliers of Paris. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, she absorbed a couture-level education in color, surface, and the art of printed textiles and creating an international home furnishing collection from inception: the standards of the atelier, the sensibility of French decorative culture, the understanding that beauty and rigor are not opposites. The textile collections of nearby Mulhouse, the patterned folk art of Alsace, the particular quality of that Franco-Germanic light — all of it left a permanent mark. She presented her work at the Paris Biennale, then carried that refined European sensibility into her next chapter as Design Coordinator for Habitat UK, and eventually across the Atlantic to shape the aesthetic vision of West Elm and Pottery Barn.
After a profound personal turning point, Alison returned to her studio practice and began creating the work that now defines her: richly layered paintings and drawings that explore narrative animal imagery, surface pattern, memory, and material culture. Deeply influenced by Abstract Expressionism and informed by years of study in Kabbalah, crystal healing, and Max Meditation, her practice is one of transformation — both personal and visual.
Alison has exhibited at the High Line Nine in Manhattan, The Art Student’s League, Washington Square Park Outdoor Exhibition, Mriya Gallery and Alpha Art Gallery, and has collaborated with MoMA, the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, Natural Curiosities and Zoe Bio’s. Her work is held in private collections and has been recognized in press and publications.
She lives and works in New York City, and continues to draw deep inspiration from France, Corsica, Sardinia, Greece, the Sahara, and the streets of Manhattan.
Available for commissions, exhibitions, licensing collaborations, and speaking engagements.Contact: alisonljones123@gmail.com | Instagram: @nyc_artwhisperer
Artist Statement.
My work begins with a longing — to make visible what lives beneath the surface of things: memory, instinct, the slow language of pattern and material, the charged silence of an animal's gaze.
I work across painting, drawing, printmaking, and surface design, drawn to the places where fine art and decorative form dissolve into one another. My practice is shaped by decades of engagement with color, textile language, and global visual culture — and nowhere was that engagement more formative than in Alsace, France, where I lived and worked in the early part of my career.
I was, in many ways, the factory girl. I worked the floor at DMC Texunion, developing color and textile concepts for collections presented at the Paris Biennale. But I was also, by great fortune, the apprentice of a remarkable woman — a grande dame of French couture, high-born and exacting, who took my education seriously in ways I could not yet fully understand. She had me traveling back and forth between Alsace and Paris, between the industrial and the exquisite, between the loom and the atelier. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, I absorbed as much as I could carry: the couture standard of color, the French insistence on precision and beauty, the understanding that decoration is never merely decoration — it is a language, a discipline, an act of intelligence.
Alsace itself was its own teacher. A region balanced between France and Germany, its centuries-old decorative traditions — painted faïence, embroidered folk textiles, half-timbered villages thick with pattern and symbol — surrounded me daily. Nearby Mulhouse, home to one of the world's great museums of printed textile, became a second school. What I learned in those years — in the factory, on the trains to Paris, in the orbit of a woman who understood beauty as a serious matter — is woven into everything I make.
For much of my professional life, I directed the visual identity of major design brands — exploring how color and pattern carry feeling, how objects hold memory, how beauty functions as a kind of language. When personal transformation called me back to the studio, I brought that layered sensibility with me: a deep attentiveness to surface and story, alongside a new willingness to let the work be raw, instinctive, and alive.
Animal imagery is central to my practice — not as illustration, but as encounter. Animals appear in my work as guides, as mirrors, as inhabitants of a world both familiar and strange. Alongside them, I explore landscape and journey: the energy of New York City, the ancient silence of the Sahara, the luminous coasts of Corsica and Sardinia, and always, the enduring pull of France. These are not simply places; they are states of consciousness, layers of self.
My work is informed by a study of Kabbalah and the healing arts, by the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, and by the belief that art — like healing — is an act of uncovering. I am interested in the threshold between structure and freedom, between the decorative and the elemental, between what we carry and what we are allowed to release.