From kids table to easel

By Richard Schaan
Contributing Writer

With one breath Fargo painter Dan Jones was sitting at his kitchen table, with the next he felt a sharp pain in his head, and with another, he hit the floor. When his son came home for lunch, he found his father coughing up blood and called 911.

As the helicopter airlifted Jones to the U of M Medical Center, the last thing he remembered seeing was the flood waters of 2009 swelling beyond the banks of the Red and threatening the city he called home and his home itself, which sat between 4th Street and the river near the water treatment plant.

Three weeks later he woke, surrounded by his family, in a hospital bed. The flood was now in the past and so was one of Jones’ favorite pastimes.

“My wife looked at me and said: ‘Guess what, you quit smoking,’” Jones recalled.

Following his brain aneurysm, the trio of doctors that Jones called “the three wise men” had their own nickname for him—“the miracle man,” a title he earned by surviving an experience he wasn’t supposed to live through. But for Dan the real work began with rehab. Relearning how to talk, how to think and how to paint, Jones is grateful for everyone who helped him, including but not limited to Shad and Marnie Piehl, Dr. Tumula, speech therapist Sara Ring at Sanford and most importantly, his wife.

“The recovery is all about my wife Julia and her incredible perseverance,” he said.

Jones likes to joke that at first he thought his next career would be in stand-up comedy because he felt that he was exceptionally witty post-aneurysm, but “then I noticed that people wouldn’t have dinner with me, and my wife told me I wasn’t all that funny,” Jones said with a mischievous smile.

Suffering from an after effect that Jones describes as “hallucinating with your mouth,” the recovery period included the humbling experience of not being able to communicate at the same level as before.

“If I ever write a book about my rehab experience, I want to call it ‘Back at the Kids Table,’” he said. “Because when I stayed with Shad and Marnie Piehl, I sat at the little table with their three boys and they were all smarter than me at that point.”

Now, over two years later, a new selection of Jones’ works opened in the HoDo Restaurant on last Monday and will remain there throughout the summer. Much smaller in size than his previous work, Jones attributes the change as much to his new lifestyle as to an artistic choice.

“It was hard to get back into painting because smoking was such a big part of my routine,” he said. 

But smaller works and a smoke-free studio are not the only changes for Jones.

“I’m having fun with painting for the first time,” he said. “People often say, ‘how wonderful to work at something you love,’ but it wasn’t like that for me; it was always hard work.”

Hard as it may have been, at least it was the type of hard work that he wanted to do. After spending his 20s as a journeyman carpenter, Jones hated his career and enrolled in the architecture program at NDSU, where he took a required drawing class that led to an elective painting class, and eventually, to an unexpected shift in career that Jones credits for saving his life.

“For my own sanity, the switch to painting was huge,” he said. “Also, if I hadn’t gone to NDSU, I might not have met my wife, who is my best friend.”

Almost completely recovered, Jones has returned to painting with a new enthusiasm and new ideas, including a fascination with the art movement called Tonalism, a late 19th century American style that features landscapes with simplified, basic shapes and an emphasis on mood and shadow.

Total Picture Framing’s Steve Johnson, a man Jones calls “an artist in his own right” for his framing skills and his honest critique of the work, did all the frame work for Jones’ new show at the HoDo, and with 36 works lining the walls of one of Fargo’s best restaurants, the return of the Miracle Man appears to be a certain success.

Jones would prefer to not be known for his aneurysm, but he admits it can’t be helped because it’s now such a large part of who he is, and while admitting his reluctance to recite a cliché, he cannot deny that his near-death experience has changed him.

“You get kinda happy just to open your eyes in the morning, to get another day.”

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IF YOU GO:
Who: Dan Jones
Where: HoDo Restaurant
When: Summer 2011
Info: danjonesstudio.com