|art of the state
An Herb Jackson painting, Fire Dance
Into being PAINTER HERB JACKSON CREATES METICULOUS, VIBRANT ABSTRACTS.
ART COURTESY HERB JACKSON
by Liza Roberts
“I
don’t want you to know how I work unless I tell you, because I want it to seem spontaneous,” Herb Jackson says. He’s in his Davidson studio, surrounded by the unmistakable works that have made his name; the vibrant, abstract paintings that convey energy and light and appear to have been made with swift, gestural strokes. But in reality, he notes, holding two fingers up in a narrow pinch, “I’m working about that much at a time. “The tricky thing is to make it not look like that,” Jackson says. “It’s a little archaeological. There’s a lot of drawing that goes on. I can work for hours on an area, and the next day completely cover it.” These palette-knifed layers accumulate, day by day, sometimes
into the triple digits; many he scrapes away or sands with pumice. “If it’s not up to what I want it to be, then I just keep working,” he says. Light and shape and color and texture shift and morph, disappear and reemerge. About two-thirds of the way through, a painting “will begin to assert itself,” and when they’re finished, “they tell me,” he explains. Art has been communicating with Jackson since he was a child. He won his first art award when he was still a teenager as part of a juried exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art. His work has now been collected by more than 100 museums, including London’s British Museum; has been shown in more than 150 solo exhibitions around the world; and has won him the state’s southparkmagazine.com | 51
