JULIAN JACKSON
In the year 1073, Painter and theorist Kuo Hsi asked, "Why do people love landscape?" and answered, "Hills and gardens restore our nature (chi),
so we should visit them often".
Painting for me has always been a means of approaching and understanding the natural world both as we find it and how we apprehend and reconfigure it. The rational construct of the framing rectangle provides limitless interpretive space in which to experience multiple realities. I am particularly interested in creating work with the power to suggest experience rather than define it, where engagement is, in a sense, physical and one enters the painting as one might enter a forest or take the first step on a path.
I think of paintings as places that one can revisit often as one would a favorite mountain, tree, garden, or building.
The elusive nature of light has been my subject now for more than ten years and I have come to embrace this ephemerality with its’ attendant ambiguities as the core of my painting practice.
In my paintings, composed structures provide a toehold in woozy space while colors shift and spill from their indeterminate boundaries like changing moods.
The work finds its’ grounding in the fundamental opposition of the vertical to the horizontal axis. My compositions appear nearly as solid as architecture when viewed from a distance but upon closer inspection their ambiguous space reveals itself as the layers and shapes soften and shift. Spatially nothing within these complex structures is set and there is an appearance of constant and subtle motion. Working with layers of thin oil glazes, I brush the paint surface out until it is completely softened and nearly devoid of brush strokes. In this way, I dematerialize the substance of paint, covering the tracks of process to present a tangible experience of color that is closer to its’ source; light.
Light, color, and a sense of complex layered space are the central themes of my work.
- Julian Jackson
In the year 1073, Painter and theorist Kuo Hsi asked, "Why do people love landscape?" and answered, "Hills and gardens restore our nature (chi),
so we should visit them often".
Painting for me has always been a means of approaching and understanding the natural world both as we find it and how we apprehend and reconfigure it. The rational construct of the framing rectangle provides limitless interpretive space in which to experience multiple realities. I am particularly interested in creating work with the power to suggest experience rather than define it, where engagement is, in a sense, physical and one enters the painting as one might enter a forest or take the first step on a path.
I think of paintings as places that one can revisit often as one would a favorite mountain, tree, garden, or building.
The elusive nature of light has been my subject now for more than ten years and I have come to embrace this ephemerality with its’ attendant ambiguities as the core of my painting practice.
In my paintings, composed structures provide a toehold in woozy space while colors shift and spill from their indeterminate boundaries like changing moods.
The work finds its’ grounding in the fundamental opposition of the vertical to the horizontal axis. My compositions appear nearly as solid as architecture when viewed from a distance but upon closer inspection their ambiguous space reveals itself as the layers and shapes soften and shift. Spatially nothing within these complex structures is set and there is an appearance of constant and subtle motion. Working with layers of thin oil glazes, I brush the paint surface out until it is completely softened and nearly devoid of brush strokes. In this way, I dematerialize the substance of paint, covering the tracks of process to present a tangible experience of color that is closer to its’ source; light.
Light, color, and a sense of complex layered space are the central themes of my work.
- Julian Jackson
