Jeffrey Catherine Jones (1944-2011)

Artist Jeffrey Catherine Jones, 67, died May 18, 2011 of complications from emphysema and heart trouble. Jones was a prolific fantasy artist, best known for her iconic cover paintings for Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novels in the ’70s. She also did work for books by Andre Norton, Dean Koontz, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, and many others, painting more than 150 covers from the late ’60s through the late ’70s. She was also renowned for her comics work in Heavy Metal and National Lampoon. In the ’80s she turned her attention primarily to fine art, but in the 2000s she began to produce work for comics again.

Jones was a member of legendary artists’ group The Studio from 1975-79, sharing workspace in New York with Bernie Wrightson, Michael William Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith; their work was showcased in art book The Studio (1979). Jones’s art has been collected in Age of Innocence: The Romantic Art of Jeffrey Jones (1994), The Art of Jeffrey Jones (2002), Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook (2007), and Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art (2011).

She was nominated for a fan artist Hugo Award in 1967; professional artist Hugo Awards in 1970, ’71, and ’72; nominated for a World Fantasy Award for best artist in 1975, and won the Award in 1986; nominated for a Chesley Award for artistic achievement in 1999; and named a Spectrum Grandmaster in 2006.

Jones was born January 10, 1944 in Atlanta GA, attended Georgia State College, and moved to New York in the mid ’60s. In the late ’90s she began hormone replacement therapy and became known as Jeffrey Catherine Jones. She is survived by her daughter.