Steve ApplefordKorin Faught and Adam Jones live in a home filled with art and toys. It sits on a hillside overlooking the Malibu shore, and it's where Faught paints large canvases of women, which feel soft and romantic on the surface while suggesting undertones of tension and despair. Jones, Faught's husband, is best known as guitarist and video director for the multiplatinum prog-rock band Tool.
The walls of their home are covered with paintings and framed comic book art. Three Grammy Awards sit on the mantle, and the toys of their young son are scattered everywhere. On the back patio stands a giant statue of the Ape Lawgiver from the original Planet of the Apes films.
“We really love art,” says Jones, who created special effects for movies before Tool took off. “There's a work ethic. We get very inspired off each other. It's like two magnets coming together and becoming a strong force. I can't think of anything I do now where I don't go to her and go, 'What do you think of this? What would you do?'”
Last month, Faught had a show of her work called “Lost Days” at the Corey Helford Gallery in downtown L.A. The work depicted women in bed, tangled amid sheets and veils, their expressions lost and wistful. The canvases were painted in the classic figurative tradition of John Singer Sargent but with a modern twist: The same woman is typically depicted two or more times in the same piece, creating a sequence that tells an emotional story.
“I started with the multiple figures pretty early on,” Faught says. “It was a sort of an accident and I liked the way it looked and felt — and what it described for me: more of a story between two characters and what that meant as a dialogue. I ran with it.”
Faught and Jones with Ape Lawgiver; Credit: Steve Appleford
She first learned about art while growing up in Colorado, traveling to far-flung art museums with her mother, a flight attendant. She now paints every day at home in a studio bathed in natural light. The room was previously Jones' music studio, and a pair of his longhorn steer heads remain mounted on the wall. Also watching over the room are two Pee-wee Herman dolls.
They met while discussing a potential commission to paint a mutual friend, a frequent subject in Faught's work, and the two soon bonded over a shared love of horror movies. (“The gorier, the better,” she says.) He introduced her to wrestling, and proposed ringside at the 2013 WWE Royal Rumble.
As she sits in her kitchen on a later afternoon, Faught is nine months pregnant, anticipating the birth of their second son on a due date of historical significance: Election Day.
“So there's a countdown on CNN as we speak,” she says with a laugh. On the table is a container of her handpainted Halloween cookies in the shape of various creatures: bats, cats and a pouting Donald Trump. She only rarely paints male figures, though she did do a small study of Jones for 2014's “Sound and Vision” group show at Sound City Studios.
“I don't feel the connection with the male form as often,” she explains. “It doesn't feel like I'm talking through them. What I'm trying to get through is my own voice, and using male models and forms doesn't seem as real a connection. I didn't have a male figure growing up. Maybe that has something to do with being connected to femaleness and wanting to explore that side. There may come a time where I decide to explore my male side. I will have two sons running around, so I might get in touch with that side pretty quickly.”
Jones studied painting and has worked in a variety of creative mediums. His videos for Tool were an essential part of announcing the band's bleak but intense aesthetic in the '90s, depicting humans in various stages of decay. Faught calls her own voice “morbid,” but Jones sees in her work something mysterious.
“It's very exciting to me because I can't do it,” says Jones. “Oil paints have just been baffling to me. I have a lot of empathy when I can see the hard work that went into it, and artists ripping their guts out to produce something really beautiful. That's what really moves me.”
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