He is a gifted visual artist, but Oliver Lee Jackson possesses the additional ability to use language to provide a unique perspective for observing art. His discourse on what compels him to create provides a deeper level of understanding about what artists intend to achieve with their personal creative responses to the world as they see it.
“That the event would arise for a person in that situation – a type of urgency and feelings that keep shifting in many ways from being elegant, desperate and strong at the same time.”
That was the case recently when the St. Louis native discussed select works that are currently on display as part of the programming organized around The Saint Louis Art Museum presentation of “Oliver Lee Jackson.” The exhibition is curated by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art, and Hannah Klemm, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, along with research assistant Molly Moog. “Oliver Lee Jackson” is free and open to the public and will be on view in Galleries 249 and 257 through February 20, 2022.
During the virtual program that took place via Zoom in December, Jackson discussed some pieces that spanned more than five decades with Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. Jackson’s work was exhibited at this prestigious national venue for more than five months in 2019.
The conversation was a master class in creative intention.
“In this painting, I wanted it to be beautiful – but awful – beautiful, but awful,” Jackson said while describing a work from his famed Sharpeville Series. “This back and forth of just the way that the flamelike application of the paint around the figuration is beautiful in itself, but the addition of the figuration adds up to another figuration and they should be quite mixed in terms of experience.”
The paintings were inspired by photographs of the Sharpeville massacre in1960, when 250 South Africans were killed or wounded for protesting apartheid non-violently.
For the viewer – and Jackson counted himself as one – his aim was to unearth a sense of urgency as viewers grasp the tragic reality that inspired the art.
“The sense of urgency in the paintings that we’ve looked at was fundamental,” Jackson said. “This is to make the experience very rich in terms of the emotional shifts that the event would arise for a person in that situation – a type of urgency and feelings that keep shifting in many ways from being elegant, desperate and strong at the same time.”
Cooper pointed out Jackson’s propensity for inserting figures within his work that fosters a multiplicity that keeps the viewer engaged – and drawing a new experience with each viewing – as they moved on to discuss additional works from the exhibition.
“Personally, I go back and forth and when I’m experiencing your work,” Cooper said. “ I often don’t try too hard to find the figures right away because there is so much to see.”
“I don’t think that there is ever anything hidden in a painting, but you have to learn it’s vocabulary,” Jackson responded. “Each work has a kind of vocabulary that is determined by the effect of the field you want to pull the viewer.”
He likens his paintings to making a world.
“And in this world, everything has to augment the thrust of the work, but belong to that world – so that the aesthetics cannot step outside of it,” Jackson said. “ They need to be beautiful, but the beauty inside that particular modality. It’s making a fluid figuration with a field.”
Jackson went deeper as he discussed the process of creating imagery.
“The word drawing itself is to pull forth an image,” Jackson said, “ When you are drawing, you are doing two things simultaneously – you are marking what can be marked to bring forth what can be seen. While you are drawing out, you are also marking in. It’s an interesting dynamic. You are marking by drawing on it, but at the same time the marks must bring forth something.”
During the talk Cooper and Jackson also mentioned paintings and sculptures featured in the “Oliver Lee Jackson: Any Eyes” exhibition, curated by his longtime collaborator Diane Roby, which is currently on display at the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa Valley, California through February 20.
They also touched upon a highly personal project, ‘Dear Friend,’ that Jackson recently developed as a tribute to the late composer and Black Artists Group co-founder Julius Hemphill.
The folio ‘Dear Friend’ was conceived and designed by Jackson and features sheet music of Hemphill compositions paired with paintings and drawings that add visual context to the music.
Hemphill, who was also a co-founder of the acclaimed World Saxophone Quartet, spent several years in St. Louis – where a creative collaboration and friendship was fostered between he and Jackson.
“I wasn’t trying to have anything to do with trying to draw music, but trying to see the relationship – which is so beautiful – between his markings and my markings,” Jackson said of the project. “Each page will have a feeling to it.”
Jackson insisted upon sharing a Hemphill quote with the audience.
“I am not an evangelist,” Jackson read. “I am simply a man, trying to steer himself through his own confusion so that he can communicate in a sincere voice with other human beings.”
The words of the late musical genius are also applicable to Jackson’s art – and his ability to express the pathology behind it.
“Oliver Lee Jackson,” will be on view in Gallery 249 and Gallery 257 of the Saint Louis Art Museum through Feb. 20, 2022. For hours and additional information, visit www.slam.org.
