"Colour's never static: colour's always moving. So the forms are moving."
Vanessa Jackson (b. 1953, UK) has been a prominent figure in the British art scene since the 1970s. Living and working in London since 1971, Jackson graduated from St Martins School of Art (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MA). She has worked as one of London's leading tutors of fine art, having taught at the Royal Academy Schools, the Royal College of Art, and the Winchester School of Art where she became Head of Painting in 1988. Jackson was elected as a Royal Academician in 2015.
Jackson’s work uses geometry to play with space, architecture, and visual perception. She incorporates semi-hard-edged shapes and colors, drawing on the history and tradition of abstract painting, specifically its use of optical and spatial illusions. In her works, shapes interact through color and space, overlapping at carefully positioned angles to give the appearance they could shift at any moment.
Her process begins by hand-drawing each shape. She then uses a large palette knife to apply paint in thick blocks of color. Jackson often begins with one color that she applies to two or three paintings she’s working on simultaneously. She chooses the other colors based on the reaction between the hues in order to produce works that are both harmonious and dissonant. The size of her paintings requires her to move around the canvas as she works, further contributing to the pieces’ sense of motion.
While Jackson’s early works feature organic and glyph-like forms her later works create architectural space. Throughout her career, geometry and the relationship between shape and color have remained central to her work. Her interest in drawing as a source of energy, a way to explore shapes, and enliven areas of color has persisted. In her paintings, basic forms and lively brush marks combine in precise and immaculately painted works. Jackson seeks to reject the supposed flatness of modernist space by using dynamic shapes to construct a sense of space and depth. Her use of intersecting rectilinear forms shows the influence of Minimalism, Cubism and Russian Constructivism.