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Jonathan Fontenot is an artist working in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.  His work has been exhibited at the Ant Colony Gallery, Kettle Arts, the Mitchell Lofts Gallery, 500 X Gallery, the Blue Room Studios in Dallas, the Art Depot in Lubbock, the 411 Gallery and Carillon Gallery of Tarrant County Community College-South in Fort Worth.  He received his training at Otis College of Art and Design and the University of North Texas where he received his BFA in Drawing and Painting and his BA in Visual Art Studies.  He was born in New Orleans in 1975 and has since lived in a variety of places from Richmond, VA to Los Angeles, to Alta, UT.  He current lives in Dallas and teaches at Irving High School in Irving, TX.

His work centers on images of childhood and adult responses to them. He has been seeking an answer to the question “what is childhood?” since he began creating art. He began pursuing this theme in high school after rereading books from his childhood, and discovering in them the adult ideas which the author often did not divorce from the naiveté of the children’s story.  Intrigue regarding the juxtaposition of adult concerns with the innocence of childhood imagination drives the majority of his compositions.  His curiosity has led him to explore everything from childish doodles to complex objects of mass media, from the misappropriation of words and imagery by teenagers to the subtle nostalgia adults feel when faced with the familiar smells, textures, and patterns of childhood.

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