BELLA VISTA — Just honk your horn and holler “Hello” when you stop at the Sycamore Hill Art Gallery in Lanagan, Missouri. The Gallery is open in the afternoon seven days a week, but the artist may not hear her visitors because she may be out back sawing up cedar or other logs to create her contemporary sculptures.

To find the gallery, take U.S. Highway 71 about 12 miles north to Missouri Highway EE, which comes just after Highway H.

Visitors will see several large pieces, made from wood about 20 feet high, when they drive in to artist Susana Jones’ yard. The works illusrates the conflict between nature and culture, she said.

After looking at the art in her yard, visitors can visit her gallery in her craftsman-style home.

The gallery is filled with watercolors, pottery, small wooden sculptures and other unique art.

In addition to showing her products in the gallery, her work is displayed in parks and museums in the United States and Costa Rica.

One of them is a 12-foot-high sculpture with stone directional arrows and with two dugout canoes, 12 and 14 feet long, built for the River Bluff Park in Kansas City, Mo., at the request of the Lewis and Clark Memorial Commission.

On Sept. 26, she delivered her most recent creation, “HERmitage 2,” made out of the heart of three cedar trees, to a park in Jackson, Tenn.

The middle of the cedar is the best wood for outdoors because it lasts forever, she said. She finds trees on her property and then uses a power saw to trim away the soft outside, leaving the hard inner core.

Before she got into creating large-scale sculptures from wood, shewas a painter.

For 22 years, until 1994, Jones lived in Costa Rica and painted and sold watercolors there.

Then, she returned to the house in Lanagan that she and her sister Janet Stanton bought in 1974. She wanted to be near her mother and father, Lily May and William Jones, who lived in Bella Vista and who passed away about eight years ago.

Shortly after moving back here, she started working on her masters in fine arts at the University of Arkansas. There, in a drawing class taught by Ken Stout, shewas working on a assignment using short pencil strokes. She decided to transfer her idea to a split piece of wood.

“It was a tangible object,” she said.

After working in twodimensions for so long, she wanted something different. “I felt like working in three demensions,” she said.

Working in wood was natural for her because growing up she spent a lot of time with her father working on carpentry projects.

She builds most of her large sculptures during the warm weather. When winter comes, she works on her smaller project such as watercolors, ceremics and pottery.

Her watercolors feature beautiful trees and wild landscapes, but she also has started having fun with doughnuts and fruit.

She paints a bowl of fruit and scatters some doughnuts near the fruit. She has taken fresh doughnuts and preserved them and then created ceramic doughnuts identical to the original.

Then the game becomes guess which one is the real doughnut.

Jones teaches art at Northwest Arkansas Community College. For more information or to schedule a time to visit the gallery, or call (417) 436-2355.

Business, Pages 10 on 10/21/2009

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