Our esteemed artist colleague David W. Jones has retired from the WEST tour. An inaugural artist on this 28 year-old tour, David is one of Canada's foremost landscape painters and WEST visitors over the years have had the opportunity to enjoy his amazing work.

This year, as a celebration of our longstanding relationship with David, each location on the tour will be displaying and selling one of David's original paintings!  This is your FINAL opportunity to collect his work as part of this tour.

An Accomplished and Fascinating History

Over the past 40 years David Jones exhibited his oils, watercolours and etchings extensively across Canada, Japan and the U.S. In 1981, he received a special commission to be Canada’s War Artist depicting activities onboard a destroyer on the Pacific Ocean. In 1985, a major art exhibition commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Navy toured North America and David’s works were displayed alongside works by Arthur Lismer, Alex Colville and William Ogilvy.

In Canada, his works were shown at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, the National Museum of Nature and the British Columbia Provincial Museum. In addition to being represented in numerous private galleries across Canada, Jones works are part of such diverse collections as the National War Art collection, the City of Ottawa collection, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans collection and the collection of jazz great Benny Goodman.

In March 2003, David was invited to paint on stage with the National Arts Centre Orchestra for two sold out concerts. He created two paintings while the orchestra performed the music of George Gershwin and Alexina Louie.

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Locally, David taught painting for many years, often outdoors ‘en plein air’ and was an artist in residence at local schools. Many students had the unique opportunity to learn from him. The WEST artists will dearly miss his contribution to the tour, his wonderful sense of humour and people-centred personality.