Comedy Tragedy
THE DUAL NATURE OF LIFE INSPIRES ROBERT C. JACKSON’S PAINTINGS FOR HIS NEW EXHIBITION AT GALLERY HENOCH IN NEW YORK CITY.
Robert C. Jackson turns 55 a week before the opening of his exhibition Offbeat at Gallery Henoch in New York, October 24. He says, “I always looked at artists in their 50s as people who were admired. They’re in their groove. They’ve tried so hard to find themselves. They can say ‘This is who I am!’ I’ve had a nice, successful career. I’m comfortable with my art and people do collect it.” The exhibition runs through November 16.
This year has had its ups and downs. An exhibition of his paintings, which featured an artist’s residency at the Evansville Museum in Indiana, runs through November 3. In April, his daughter, Becca, a former Miss Delaware, was married. But April can be “the cruelest month” as T.S. Eliot wrote. Jackson was on a ladder outside his studio when he fell off, landing on his back on the sidewalk. He broke four vertebrae. Fortunately, the nerves weren’t damaged and he is continuing his, at first, extremely painful recovery.
He is sustained by family and friends as well as his sense of humor. Of his painting
Creative Explosion, he comments, “I have a classical side but I love the work of Jasper Johns and I often refer to a book of his work and love playing with abstraction.” The paint cans along the top of the painting have discreet drips of paint down their sides except for the yellow one, which has multiple drips and fingerprints. “I was holding the yellow paint can when I fell,” he explains. “Yellow has taken on a new meaning for me.”
He says, “I’m not sure where I fit in the realist spectrum. I find it a challenge to put humor in art. Sure, it is taboo, but I do feel like the soul is reached by the comic and the tragic, and much of the time they go hand in hand. I find life is often ludicrous and worth laughing at.”
Wrestling with the idea of a staid still life of objects on a tabletop, he began using commercial crates— sometimes turning one upside down so the objects wouldn’t disappear inside it. The crates introduced color and text and soon became his mark. “I kind of own them,” he says. “They’re my signature. I want people to be able to say ‘That’s a Robert Jackson!’ I want people to be attracted to the paintings from 12 feet across the room and then get closer and become involved with them.” There is a narrative, but the viewer is free to add to it and reinterpret it. “I want art to engage,” he adds.
“I want the painting to be a conversation piece. I don’t go out to antique shops looking for an object to paint. The paintings aren’t dictated by the object. I always base them on my sketchbook of drawings. They’re not finished drawings. They’re more a notebook of ideas.”
Jackson literally wanted to make his mark in his painting Artist’s Touch. “I put paint on my hand and then pressed it against the painting of boxes,” he explains. “I suddenly realized it looked like a handprint on a two-dimensional painting, not a handprint on a stack of three-dimensional boxes. I had to back in and scrape and adjust to get a realistic effect.”
Looking at his paintings, it’s often fun to discover boxes you’ve seen in other paintings. They reappear like old friends. It’s almost impossible not to wander over the lettering to come up with connections and new meanings. In Encounter, a seagull “encounters” a clumsy imitation of himself. “Seagulls can be mean, nasty, bitchy,” Jackson observes. The real gull seems to be telling the other to do something about its fat legs. The confrontation takes place on a stack of boxes recalling the colors of the sea.
“I told the gallery I hear music on the offbeat. When you tell people you’re a still life painter they think fruits and flowers,” he says. “I listen to the gamut of music when I’m painting and since I grew up in the punk era, it’s often the Ramones. When you listen to a Beatles song, on the surface it’s awesome. But when you live with it for a while it becomes deeper. I want my paintings to be like that. I want to make daydreamers.”