Mark Jackson
November 2023
In this feature Mark shares his relationship to each work, when we visited Mark in his studio last month, we were fascinated to understand that every work Mark creates is carefully considered, each work is an intuitive process for the artist and documents his very own journey that unfolds throughout the painting process, not restricted by media, but information, sensitivity and debris are combined with Mark's interest in history, philosophy and modern society.
Mark Jackson paints surreal, dreamlike scenes that range from speculations on the future of human existence, to improbable tableaux of musicians with resurrected Ancient Egyptians, to works that are narratively unhinged and remain elusive. Being experimental in nature, with both material and subject, clarity is often just beyond reach.
Mark studied BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting at Loughborough University (1998) and MA (Distinction) Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design (2006). He collaborated as part of Jackson Webb (2003 - 2010). His first solo show was at Block 336 London (2017), this year he presented 'turtles all the way down', a solo exhibition of large-scale paintings and a sculptural installation of works on paper, held at OHSH Projects, London. He’s exhibited nationally and internationally. He also curates, writes and conducts interviews, most recently with Richard Aldrich (Turps Magazine 2024).
Mark Jackson
palace, 2023
Oil on canvas
45 x 30 cm
Copyright of the artist
This is a return to the face. When I began painting around 10 years ago I just started with faces. I thought they were the most fundamental thing, so I started there. They’re also one of the hardest things, because any inflection, in an eye, in a smile is emotive. Strangely I’ve been able to make my faces quite blank sometimes. They started out like this and then I tried to hold on to that quality. This one is my first revisit to the face in 5 years, this time with a totally improvised approach. I’ll typically now have a dozen canvases like this on the go at any one time, that I work on over months and months.
Mark Jackson
smile, 2023
Oil on linen
45 x 30 cm
Copyright of the artist
With this I was wondering how little you can do to make a face. I mean it’s mostly a very abstract image, but in the context of the other paintings the lips feel like a focus point that we can grip onto, to pull it into representation. Many paintings like this one are truly experiments. So many of my canvases fail because I’ll try all sorts out on them, and I often don’t see them as works anymore, but just bits to try stuff out on. And then sometimes I try something that pulls the whole thing back into art again. I mean what’s happened here kind of holds me in a way that maybe it wouldn’t if I’d have intended on doing it.
Mark Jackson
pale fire, 2023
Oil on canvas
50 x 60 cm
Copyright of the artist
“My figures are not very fleshy—they’re not like Freud, Bacon or de Kooning in that way. They’re more ethereal, like Giacometti, or Picabia’s transparent works. This painting is almost like a projection of a face on sand, as if it’s only made of light. It’s actually a copy of another work, where the face(s) in the middle I felt needed more space, so I copied them onto this canvas, giving them that border. The work I took the faces from has now also changed, and I’ve added a copper plate to the top of that one. So in a way the original work is missing, even though I have two very different instantiations of it. I like to undo anything that feels too singular.”
Mark Jackson
frozen lake, 2020
Oil, spray, purple tack and canvas tape frame on canvas
225 x 200 cm (two panels)
Copyright of the artist, Image courtesy of Benjamin Deakin
“This was my biggest lock-down painting. It took forever and I tried so many things with it. Originally it was a painting of a single diver in this long format. The canvas is now in 2 sections—a long, thin one and a much wider one to the right. But early on it was just the thin one. I’d been thinking about de Kooning’s paintings on doors in a similar but slightly wider format. Anyway I’d bitten off more than I could chew with that ratio, so I added the larger canvas on the right. I’d been painting the diver for a year on and off, and when I added the larger section I finished it in a month. The painting became a grouping of, I’d say 3 figures, but they’re hard to see. In the end I tried to create a glassy, icy scene of refracted and fragmented forms. It was a hot summer. And we were trapped. I remember thinking at the time that our whole concept of the future was changing. But I think ironically there’s a freedom in this painting that is difficult to attain for me as a painter for long.”
Mark Jackson
Oil, spray and acrylic on canvas, 2022
184 x 145 cm
Copyright of the artist
This has been three different paintings, all of which at some point I thought were definitely finished. And then the doubt would creep in. In the end I gave it 3 titles to say hello to that, but then took them away again. It is now, after all, one work! Strangely, the suit of spades shape from a deck of cards, kept cropping up in the forms, in the composition. Incredibly when I marbled the whole surface at one point, pouring paint around, another half-spade appeared, so I faked it to make it a full one. Once you know they’re there, they permeate the whole image. There’s a striking Diebenkorn sketch from one of his sketchbooks of the same form and I think it’d been in my mind—All we are are vessels for the transmutation of forms and ideas that flow through our image-history. A friend, John Walter, said something like that to me recently, although he put it better.