Beacon artist celebrates the macabre
If Chelsea Jones changed her legal name, “Chelsea Juxtaposition Bones would be ideal,” she says. Her brand is “all about embracing the spooky season 365” and she almost always wears black, though acceptable modifications include offbeat logos and “splatters of blood.”
The potential middle moniker is apt. Jones splashes her work with color but keeps the subjects dark. Her family raised an adorable white bishon frise that died recently at age 17. Name: Marilyn Manson, after the gaunt hard rocker.
“That was my choice,” she says.
Jones, 33, who moved to Beacon in 2017 and works a corporate job, is focused on selling reproductions of her designs on postcards, tote bags and coffee mugs rather than showing at galleries.
Her “dreadfully delightful” postcards combine upbeat sayings with ghoulish drawings that “inject a healthy dose of obnoxious positivity into the gloomy worlds of the macabre,” according to her website.
One image features a birthday cake with eight prison-striped candles and a bent green finger with a red stiletto nail tip.
Calling her artistic self “Chelsea Bones” and the resulting creations Bonesie’s Monsters, her Instagram (@chelsbones) indicates that she’s also “Ms. Bonesie if you’re nasty.”
The art exudes a cartoonish aura, including watercolors of Black pop culture icons like TLC, Coolio and Martin Lawrence. Jones’s original characters favor light greens and powdery blues to leaven the reds and blacks that are usually used sparingly.
She’s also leaned into digital design, which “at first I thought would be cheating, but as I got into it, I realized that it’s difficult to do well,” she says. “It’s not a shortcut.”
One top-selling drawing, “New Moon Bliss,” resembles Michael Jackson with hollow eyes and head cocked at a 45-degree angle. The illustration “Porcelain Planter” and her Morte tote bag, created by manipulating a font, have sunflowers.
For art’s sake, Jones spends time on social media drumming up business and setting up booths at fairs and festivals such as Cirque du Creep and The Alchemy Festival at The Yard and the Garden Gallery behind Beacon Bread Co.
Bones’s website at bonesiesmonsters.com crackles with wit; she’s talking with a publisher about writing and illustrating a children’s book.
Some of her designs are coded. The slogan Palo & Sage is recognized by witches and the names Laurie, Ellen, Nancy and Sidney reference the final victims in four iconic horror flicks.
For old time’s sake, Jones displays two small early watercolors in her booth, depictions of the evil doll Chucky and two zombies at the beach. Upon closer review, the beach scene depicts a brain at their feet, a spider dangling from an umbrella and a picnic basket stuffed with body parts.
An old soul who is in touch with the history of darkness, including the Pagan antecedents of Halloween and the roots of witchcraft, Jones also creates work inspired by Hudson Valley serial killer Lizzie Halliday (a patient at the Matteawan asylum who died in 1918) and George Denny of Philipstown, who was hanged in 1844 and remains the only killer ever executed in Putnam County.
“I didn’t choose the dark side, it chose me,” Jones says. “There’s no attraction — I tried to reject it, but there I was as a kid in class, drawing pictures of Michael Meyers [the killer in the Halloween films] and getting in trouble.”
