Fay Jones (Seattle artist)

Fay Jones (born 1936, birth name Fay Bailey) is an American artist, based in Seattle, Washington. A large number of her works are exhibited in public places in the Pacific Northwest, including a mural in the Westlake Station of the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel and a painting in Seattle's opera house, McCaw Hall. A 1986 retrospective organized by the Boise Art Museum also showed at the Seattle Art Museum.

Jones's father, Robeson Bailey (1906-1972), taught writing and was an early faculty member of the Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Family friends in her childhood included Dorothy Parker, Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer, John Ciardi, A. B. Guthrie and Wallace Stegner. However the family was not wealthy. For some years beginning in 1950, the family operated a small hotel in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, where Jones worked in the kitchen, as well as taking care of her younger siblings. In 1953, she graduated from high school and enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

In 1956, she met RISD drawing instructor Robert C. Jones (b. 1930); they married the following year, and moved to Seattle in 1960, where Robert Jones became a member of the art faculty of the University of Washington. They had four children, born between 1958 and 1966. Fay was primarily a homemaker in those years, but managed to set aside some time to make artworks, mainly in small formats. She had her first exhibit in 1970 at the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle. The following year, she and her husband bought a run-down house, originally "more a shack" according to Jones, north of Seattle in the Skagit Valley, which became their summer place for the next 25 years. Over time they fixed up the house and built a separate outbuilding with studio space.

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