Doug Jones’ Water Prints are monumental works of gratitude. At their core, they are artifacts of a repeated gesture: water poured, pigment added, and the quiet rhythm of thanks spoken aloud. The works emerge not from a predetermined image but from a practice of acknowledgment, a process of attunement to something beyond the artist’s own will.
Each surface is formed through a dialogue between intention and release. Jones paints on location, and he draws and uses water from the nearby body of water. For example, in When the River Flows Over the Same Stone Twice, Jones paints on location, and with water from an inland lake near the headwaters of the Grand River, the Grand River itself, Lake Michigan, and the Detroit River, which records the route water takes from Michigan’s various inland sources through the Detroit River, into the Saint Lawrence River, and then out into to the Atlantic Ocean. As the audience views the work, a soundscape expands this route to include the point where the Caribbean Sea meets the rest of the Atlantic Ocean in the Dominican Republic.
In Water Prints, Jones begins with a field of water, a mutable ground that resists control. Into this, he introduces color, guiding but never fully dictating how it will spread, sink, or evaporate. The process insists on humility; the artist’s role is not to impose but to accompany, to remain present through each unfolding moment. As the paint settles, what remains on the surface is a record of that shared time—material and human physicality AB’s intention meeting in a field of chance and care.
Scale is central. Spanning lengths of up to eighteen feet, the water prints extend beyond the reach of the body. They do not operate as images contained within a frame but as environments, surfaces that hold the viewer in relation to them. To stand before one is to encounter expansiveness: color and form that seem less like compositions and more like horizons, thresholds, or weather systems. They envelop, surrounding the body in a space shaped here by an outspoken gratitude and praise to God.
Yet within their monumentality, the works remain deeply intimate. Every pour, every soft touch of pigment is accompanied by words of thanks—spoken quietly, again and again. Though these words leave no visible mark, their cadence structures the work. The final surface is not only the result of water and pigment meeting but also the imprint of my practice of repetition, of returning continuously to gratitude. What is visible is inseparable from what is spoken.
This subtle layering of presence—the visible and the invisible, the material and the spoken—gives the water prints a quality that feels both physical and immaterial. They are not only images but residues of action, of time, and of voice. They operate as artifacts from an encounter: with water, the sun, with pigment, and with the act of giving thanks.
In the history of abstraction, these works extend a conversation about what paintings can hold. The Water Prints move beyond image-making into a register where the act of making itself becomes visible. What distinguishes them is not only their scale or their chromatic complexity but their grounding in devotion, in the quiet discipline of gratitude enacted repeatedly over time.
For me, the Water Prints are not gestures toward transcendence but tangible records of practice. They hold the texture of water meeting pigment, yes, but also the rhythm of voice meeting silence. In this sense, Waters Prints are not simply paintings to be viewed but artifacts to be encountered—traces of gratitude made monumental.
What lingers in these works is less a depiction than a presence: the sense that each surface is the outcome of many small acknowledgments and moments, accumulated until they become something vast. They remind us that the act of repetition itself leaves a mark, that gratitude can take form, and that art, at its most enduring, can carry with it the residues from devotion.