Charles “Skip” Jones
March 13, 1950 – April 8, 2023
Skip was an artist and an engineer, excellent at both and mostly self-taught. He lived in Indianapolis and Seattle. He spent most of the last part of his life with his wife Cindy Chan on his rural property outside of Knightstown, Indiana. His artwork was sculptural, often steel or aluminum, with subtle surfaces and paint. In his prescient 1990 show Ulysses of the Net at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, he displayed an installation utilizing thin beams of light on three dimensional mesh surfaces. Light was always central to whatever he created. He was considered either an iconoclast, a raconteur or a visionary, depending on whom you were asking. He could also be described a futurist. He created a world of small scaled, ultra-realistic science fiction characters and spacecraft which were part of a photographic 3D graphic novel project, the frames of which were meant to be viewed with his patented 3D viewer, called Deep Eyes. Sifter, the graphic novel’s title, is set in a distant future where a hybrid human archeologist discovers an ancient civilization of humans. Us. He was always collecting objects that could be transformed into elements of his finely crafted models. He was an enthusiastic collector of 1940’s era detective pulps and toys and created a different world of small scaled dioramas and characters from that era. Skip spent his time in Seattle as one of the first to view and consult on the early experiments in virtual reality technology. He returned to Indiana after his life was tragically altered when his son, Justin, was senselessly murdered in San Francisco in 1994 while trying to help a robbery victim. Five years later Skip married Cindy Chan and enjoyed a rural life and the serenity of his studio, which was always filled with the various stages of his diverse projects. He is survived by his wife Cindy Chan, and his sister Dorothy Brunson of Cincinnati. A memorial to his life and work will be announced in the near future.