Artist and teacher Rebecca Peck Jones died in her sleep Sunday, Oct. 22, 2006 at her Riverside home. Rebecca was best known for her clay art and pottery, which she described as \u201ca form of spiritual beauty that is concrete. You can drink out of it, eat out of it or hang it in your garden.\u201d <\/p>\n
She also had a passion for teaching and was co-founder of Riverside County\u2019s high school art contest. She began art lessons at 12 in New Milford, Conn., with noted landscape and graphic artist Edith Newton. By her 20s, she had graduated with a master\u2019s degree in fine arts from the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute, now California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts). <\/p>\n
She continued to study art at numerous universities and to attend workshops with such notables as California watercolorist Rex Brandt and ceramic artist Marguerite Wildenhain, who was associated with the avant-garde Bauhaus School in Germany. <\/p>\n
In the 1950s, Rebecca was a staunch supporter and participant at the Dog Pound, a 4-acre site at the old Riverside animal shelter on 14th Street, that artists leased from the city for $1 a year. (In 1967, the Riverside Art Museum replaced it.) <\/p>\n
The Dog Pound had space for the type of free-wheeling sharing of creativity, knowledge, and arts and crafts equipment that Rebecca admired about Bauhaus. Rebecca taught art through many venues, beginning with the Telfair Art Academy that she helped to establish in Savannah, Ga., now Telfair Museum of Art. <\/p>\n
In Riverside, she taught ceramics and sculpture at California Baptist University and in her private studio. She treasured the time she worked as assistant to Ray Miller, art director for the Riverside Unified School District and the Riverside Art Museum. <\/p>\n
Earlier in her career, she edited the company magazine for Hunter Douglas Corp. and worked as an artist and writer for Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Los Angeles. <\/p>\n
Rebecca sought to learn, work and understand \u201cthe spiritual side of life and mud\u201d and to translate these ideas into clay. Some of her most compelling works were of the women, children and animals she sketched in Cairo, Egypt, and Amatenango del Valle, a tile and adobe village in Chiapas, Mexico. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always loved the human form, gesture drawings,\u201d she explained of her work. \u201cI base everything on spiritual development. I think the bottom line is your own spiritual evolution and how you relate to something that centers your life and is meaningful.\u201d <\/p>\n
Rebecca was a lifelong Christian Scientist and was influenced by the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau and Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. <\/p>\n
Rebecca made most life decisions for art\u2019s sake. For instance in 2001, she left her beloved \u201cGopher Grove,\u201d the 1-acre parcel in the green belt of Riverside she had shared with her late husband, Sims Jones. She moved to Idyllwild, a village with many artists and galleries, where she could spend more time throwing pots and creating clay sculpture and less time tending to yard and housework. <\/p>\n
Rebecca moved back to Riverside during \u201ca bad patch,\u201d as she good-humoredly called hard times. This was a temporary stop on her way to live in a Laguna Hills community with many artists, for, as she said, \u201cArt comes from within, but the environment has a lot to do with it.\u201d She was not taking her kiln \u2014 throwing pots had become too arduous \u2014 and had returned to drawing and watercolor. Rebecca looked forward to living and working among artists: \u201cJoy, oh bliss,\u201d as she liked to say about the good things coming her way. <\/p>\n
She is survived by her husband, Don O\u2019Neill; two stepsons, Richard S. Jones and Clayton S. Jones; two nieces, Cynthia Hodge Johnson and Linda Peck Smith; and two nephews, Robert L. Peck II and Andrew K. Peck. According to Rebecca\u2019s wishes, the Neptune Society is handling cremation with her ashes to be dispersed.<\/p>\n
Because art develops, and it is timeless and ageless, a Web page has been created to honor the art and life of Rebecca Peck Jones at urs2.net\/rsj\/memorial<\/a>. Friends and admirers are invited to e-mail their reminiscences to memorial@jaeger.ws<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Artist and teacher Rebecca Peck Jones died in her sleep Sunday, Oct. 22, 2006 at her Riverside home. Rebecca was best known for her clay art and pottery, which she described as \u201ca form of spiritual beauty that is concrete. You can drink out of it, eat out of it or hang it in your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"amp_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n