Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History

Lighter than Usual

Suzanne Jackson

Lighter than Usual refers to the smaller, linear-detailed watercolors, monoprints, and acrylic paintings.  The works were begun on location, as observations from nature, reflecting southern and low country tales, adventures, memories, of people and events.

In the studio, the paint, line, color, shapes, combined with recent and historic stories, fill my imagination to complete each painting.

Artist's Biography:

Suzanne Jackson allows a wide range of her own artistic impulses to be expressed in a single composition. There is the constructive impetus that deliberately plots shape and structure. There is the intuitive, poetic touch that improvises with chance and change to find surprising harmonies. And there is the risk-taking desire to come to terms with powerful forces that threaten to distort and break down. Rather than erect an impenetrable defense against them, Jackson engages what might otherwise destroy.

She has employed direct painting on canvas, drawing with graphite, as well as applied paper to create new realities from disparate emotional states and communal experiences. Her pieces read as sensitive receptors, registering in abstract language the influence of cultural continuity, social dislocation, spiritual yearning, and the grace of the physical body. Jackson shows us all the parts, formed and torn, retrieved and reused, and she shows them pieced together into an unexpected oneness. Nothing is lost here, not the pain and confusion, nor the sweetness and the beauty.

-John Mendelsohn, 2005

Suzanne Jackson, retired from the faculty of the Savannah College of Art and Design, will show her large, abstract watercolor constructions. Usually works large-scale, building up layers of paint, and incorporates different papers, rare and commonplace. Her Monoprints which “serve as ambassadors for her extra-large pieces”. These smaller works still are larger than usual.

The works are in three groups: Watercolors, Acrylic paintings (Paper-works) and Mono-prints.

Suzane Jackson was born in 1944 in Saint Louis, Missouri. She received a B.A. in Painting from San Francisco State University and holds a MFA from Yale University School of Drama and Design. Jackson is a professor of Painting at Savannah College of Art and Design.� In 2003 she was awarded a SCAD Presidential Fellowship for Printmaking and has received several other fellowships and artist residencies. Her paintings and biography have been featured in numerous publications and she has exhibited in prestigious galleries throughout the United States. Jackson’s work can be found in public and private collections both nationally and internationally.

 

Cleo's Choice                   Ibis-II, inyellowmeadows         Lizzie's Love                   Morning Garden              The General's Peach

  

White, Clearly