Finding healing in art
By Brandon Davis
Published in News on January 3, 2017 7:55 AM
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News-Argus/SETH COMBS
Snow Hill mixed media artists Robert Jones, left, and daughter Mary Dementev discuss their works at the Greene County Public Library. They are seated in front of Jones' "Letters to Christine," a piece that makes use of authentic World War II era letters between a wife and husband. As a young girl, Mary would spend time with her father as he worked on his creations. Now, as an adult artist, she uses the techniques that she saw during those quality father-daughter moments to create her own work.
Robert Jones never lent much consideration to butterflies.
Nor did he put any stock in omens.
But, facing his own mortality following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, Jones would be moved to appreciate both for their distractive powers in healing.
One particularly low afternoon, Jones found himself in his rocking chair on his patio entrenched in his thoughts when a butterfly floated near. It first danced on his right hand, and then settled on his left.
The tiny, ornate creature fluttered its wings and Jones, for the first time since hearing those dreaded words, stopped thinking about the fact that he had cancer.
When the buttefly moved on, Jones slowly stood, walked back inside his home and went straight to the computer. His research revealed the yellow and black butterfly -- a tiger swallowtail, he learned -- symbolizes health and well-being.
Since then, the grief that threatened a pox on his whole family has given way to something else, a passion for life and the courage the Jones family needed to continue on.
Now cancer-free, Jones will present his art show -- "Creative Passion ... Continuing On" -- with his daughter, Mary Dementev, at the Arts Council of Wayne County on Friday, Jan. 6, at 8 p.m.
Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, Jones said he moped and threw "pity parties" at home. He told his wife, Pat Jones, and his daughter about the butterfly, but he only shared that he had cancer with his wife.
His daughter watched her father express his sorrow for days until she went to her mother for advice.
Her mother explained that her father had cancer, but she did not want her daughter to reveal to Jones that she knew.
Not knowing how to keep her knowledge of her father's cancer from him, Mary found a way to express it secretly.
"He didn't want anybody to know until he'd actually coped with it," she said. "And I can understand that, but the problem was -- I did know."
As an undergraduate art student at East Carolina University, Mary experimented with butterfly and cocoon designs.
She created dresses that showed off green and blue-scaled butterfly wings and gray-steeled cocoons from a distance.
For one month, Mary sat with her father and showed him her dresses.
"I don't think I could've gotten through the month I had to spend time with him," Mary said. "So I created these pieces about the butterfly. It was my way of saying, 'Daddy, I know.'"
She eventually told her father she knew about his cancer, and Jones began believing the butterfly symbolized hope for him.
"It connected her with what I was having to go through," he said. "At the same time, there was hope that I would get through it."
They shared their first exhibit -- "Creative Passion" -- together at University of Mount Olive's Laughing House Hall earlier last year, but they decided to continue on with their unique talents in Goldsboro.
Jones collects objects such as corks and wooden toys to connect them to rustic cardboard and newspapers for his mixed media art, while Mary uses textiles, mannequins and three-dimensional fabrics to bring a simple dress bow and a butterfly design to life.
But Jones and his daughter's chance to express their creativity almost never happened, if it were not for the original artist of the family -- Mary's mother.
Mary's father graduated from Greene Central High School and enrolled at Lenoir Community College in Kinston for a business degree. He listened to countless lectures on money and profits, but another class and another student caught his attention.
"When I was at LCC I was a business major, and my soon-to-be-later wife was an art major," Jones said. "I actually took some art classes so I could be next to her."
Jones quickly realized he was in love with the future Mrs. Jones and the idea of creating art rather than drawing or painting it. He and his wife transferred to Barton College in Wilson, where the two received fine art degrees.
His wife went on to teach art at Wayne County schools and South Lenoir High School in Deep Run for a total of 32 years in the education field. Her husband worked on a master's degree in painting at East Carolina University and began teaching art at the college.
That's when his daughter came along.
Jones quit the master's program and stopped teaching art to work with the American Red Cross for 30 years. Jones said the career change opened up time in the afternoons to spend time with his wife and daughter at home and to learn creative art techniques.
Then Jones found a lump in his chest.
He went home one day to take a shower and noticed the lump on the right side of his chest. He met with his doctor for an X-ray, and the doctor informed Jones he would need surgery to determine if he had cancer.
Jones went through surgery, waited one week for results and received a call from the doctor.
He had stage-3 breast cancer.
"That's the last thing I thought I would get," he said. "But you never know. Whenever you hear that cancer word, the first thing is you think you have a death sentence and most people would."
Jones finished radiation the next year, and he no longer had cancer. He said his doctor only schedules an appointment once a year.
But he said having cancer gave him a different attitude toward life and art after receiving treatment.
He got off work one day in 2009 and decided to not go home. He drove to Little Washington where he came across a "junk store" full of "trinkets," and as he walked through the store he discovered a bin of old letters from World War II. Jones purchased the letters, took them home and formed collages of aged corks and penned letters.
Jones entered his work at the Arts Council that year, and his "Sacred Ground" piece -- made up of discarded umbrella parts, letters and cardboard -- currently hangs in the hallway of the Arts Council's second floor.
The journey to mixed media art allowed Jones to step out of the portrait and landscape box, but he never pushed his daughter to join him on his own path.
"There's a lot of challenges in any kind of creative field," Jones said. "You got to try to make a living, and sometimes it's hard to do that with art."
"You got to follow your dream though."
Mary graduated from Greene Central as well and attended Lenoir Community's physical therapy program. She attained an associate's degree, and her parents helped her open a physical therapy office in Greenville to build clientele.
As summer rolled around, her clients left the college town for the beach, and Mary quickly remembered her childhood. She joined East Carolina's fine arts program, completed her bachelor's degree, and she is currently working on her master's in fine arts -- as a wife and a mother.
She married fellow student Dmitry Dementev, and she gave birth to Theodore Alexander Dementev earlier this year. She has another son, 16-year-old Jacob Robert Bew.
With school and a family, Mrs. Dementev found time to have another exhibit with her father.
"I'm an artist because of my mother and my father," she said. "They did not push me into it. It's a part of who I am, and we're so similar and so different at the same time."
Metal washers have became a part of Mary's textiles to form a dress, while smashed bottle caps are sprinkled in Jones' mixed media art to create a collage.
Their art has grown far from their original work, Jones said.
"It's kind of like the metamorphosis of the butterfly," he said. "It starts out as one thing then it evolves until the day it flies out."
"That's the way art is. It starts out as one thing, and the process of it growing and maturing takes on a whole new life and meaning than it originally started out being."