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Jeffrey Catherine Jones: Yesterday's Lily
(1980 - Dragon's Dream))

A nice collection of this artist's work. With it coming soon after the period spent as part of "The Studio", most of the paintings here draw from the more dramatic illustration & prints that were available at the time. Nine of this book's 77 pages feature three complete comic stories. Ten pages are given over to text for a biography, interview and some commentary. Art pages include 12 that have multiple images and 44 that are dedicated to single pieces (ten of those full-bleeds). I particularly liked four pages that gathered together eight long works reproduced margin to margin, but without choosing to instead use double-page spreads. There is some nudity, but nothing the general populace would find objectionable. Paintings dominate, but there are a number of finished drawings and a handful of pages with light pencil works. Narratively, these images seem to cover the genres of biography, historical, horror, western, science-fiction, fantasy and sword-&-sorcery, with a small beginning-sample of the unfettered fine-art that Jones was about to abandon everything for. Where a contents-page would normally be, there is instead a single page providing every image's caption (they seem a bit perfunctory and I'm not sure if the painting titles given here are what are commonly used nowadays to discuss these works). Two collections from many years later, THE ART OF JEFFREY JONES and AGE OF INNOCENCE, placed much higher on The List, but if you have those already, you might want this volume too, as there's just a little more than half of the best exhibits here that are repeats from them.