David Jackson is a visual artist whose work has comprised painted and carved wood reliefs. Landscape and other figurative imagery have remained a focus. In recent years he has made the jump to painting on canvas. He has stated: “Nature, the human presence within it, and human effect on it are the best metaphors for my imagery. En plein air observation of my world is critical — and it is indeed a compelling moment in natural history what with fires burning and seas rising — yet the distillation of the studio is not complete without imagination.”
Jackson began art studies at the University of Maryland where he was exposed to a stellar faculty consisting of Martin Puryear, Bill Willis, Claudia DeMonte, Anne Truitt, and David Driskell among others. He went on to complete graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1981. After a Peace Corps stint in Micronesia he apprenticed to Martin Puryear for four years.
David Jackson has been the recipient of MacDowell (1986) and Yaddo (1987) residencies and a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant (1991). He has also been passionate about Japanese folk art and with Dane Owen published Japanese Cabinetry: The art and Craft of Tansu (Gibbs Smith, 2003). He has lectured and curated exhibitions on tansu and published articles in Woodwork and Daruma magazines. He received a Japan Foundation grant in 2007.
