Artist: Jackson Hammack
As a child there are two things that stand in my memory strongly: love of people and love of the natural world. Both are subjects of my own introspection of life and a soul’s spiritual journey. I first started painting even before I started school, so 3 or 4 years of age. It remained a force within me through my careers that demanded to be expressed. I would paint after work in a hot attic of a friend’s house, laying large canvases on the attic floor. I still paint with the canvas laid on the floor or a table. This allows me to puddle the paint and build up layers. I use pencil, latex oil and even house paints to build up my canvases. I use brushes, plastic wedges but also sticks and grass to move the paint. I am self-taught and continue to teach myself new techniques.
My use of color and texture is an invitation to the viewer to spark their own curiosity and cause them to look more deeply in their own self to find their authentic self. Early in my works, I choose to represent faces, albeit abstracted. They often featured red ears. Their expressions capture raw emotion. The style was very loose with much of the image merely suggested by stripes of paint. They are moody and strong.
I evolved into landscapes, informed and inspired in great part, by my love of being in nature. I hike often. These experiences would translate on to my canvases as cactus and roadrunners. My several trips to Big Bend had a transformational effect on me.
Since moving to the mountains of western North Carolina, the natural world with all the gifts she possesses has enveloped me and calmed my psyche. Distanced from the chaotic busy world of cities and airports, I can now focus on the native fauna as subjects. Roadrunners now share my subject matter with woodpeckers. Large canvases make room for bear, deer and elk. Not as they actually appear, but as I interpret them. I especially concentrate on the eyes as they are portals of their life force and innocence. The eyes invite the viewer to reconnect with the natural world that we originate from.
