Richard Jackson

Richard Jackson is an American contemporary artist born in 1939 and raised in Sacramento, he spent his free time hunting on a 2,000-acre ranch in Colusa County with his family, who are descendants of President Andrew Jackson. He studied engineering and art at Sacramento State College. He held down odd jobs like Christmas tree farming and mining for gold in Sierra City before getting his first gallery shows in L.A. in the 1970s. He now has a studio where he does all his work in Sierra Madre, California. It looks more like an auto body shop, complete with power tools, welding and woodworking equipment and milling machine. Outside he keeps two black labs, inspiration for Bad Dog and favorite hunting partners. Jackson is a devoted American maverick who has redefined and expanded painting over a forty-year period. From the beginning of his career he as driven by a relentless desire to build on the advances in painting by Jasper Johns, Jackson Polluck, and Robert Rauschenberg. Jackson is known for his large-scale, site-specific wall paintings, room-size painted environments, monumental stacked canvases, and more recent his painting “machines”. Jackson’s wild inventive, exuberant, and irrelevant take on painting has dramatically extended its performance dimensions, merged it with sculpture and architecture, and has made it as an art of everyday experience rather than one of heroic myth. Jackson has had over 30 solo exhibitions and group exhibitions throughout his career.

Early on in his career, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, Jackson introduced a series of inventive works aimed at upending the technical stylistic conventions on painting, while still having the main qualities of paint. His interest in the uncontrolled application of paint is linked to Edward Kienholz’s Broom Paintings of the 1950’s and his delight in thick, gloopy surfaces related to Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings. (Finkel) Both of these artist important influences for Jacksons work. Jackson early on