I’ve been painting for almost fifty years.
It seemed like it was easier when I was younger, but that’s only because I was more easily satisfied then.
Mastery of technique is only a part of the battle.
I have mostly mastered the techniques and methods that I now employ although I continue to be surprised by new discoveries of what one can do with paint. Mastery of technique is only a part of the battle. I say battle because painting is a kind of confrontation between the painter and the painting. The painting will do what I ask it to do. The difficulty comes when one is unsure of what to ask. The proper approach for me and the one that most often leads to success is to let the painting tell me what it wants me to do. This requires a kind of silence, an alert but quiet
uncluttered mind which is receptive and the opposite of the knowing mind which tries to force the solution. I say solution since making a painting is largely a process or problem which requires making one decision after another. There is no avoiding troubles and difficulties in the process. I don’t mean technical difficulties, although there are those too, of course. I mean the problem of successfully getting through each of the stages of the painting until it’s finished. And that only seems to happen when I (as ego) get out of the way and “listen” to the painting.
As to what motivates me:
The mystery of it. The feeling I get while working. The big ups and big downs that occur from start to finish. Of course I don’t enjoy the downs, the seemingly intractable problems that arise and which bring on feelings of great doubt and inadequacy. But, overcoming the difficulties and coming to that final decision which pulls it all together and comes from who knows where, is what gets me to go through it all again and start the next painting.
About Jackson Gregory
Jackson grew up in the Oldest House in Provincetown, MA. His father was a print maker (stone lithography) and photographer and his mother was an accomplished pianist and piano teacher. They were part of the sizable art community in that town. His parents and their artist friends encouraged Jackson in his early efforts at art making and after graduating from High School he went off to study art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA). Jackson spent most of the next ten years there as an undergraduate graduate student and teacher. After two years of teaching he left to concentrate on his own work. He considers himself a self-taught painter as he majored in printmaking at SMFA and didn’t take painting courses while he was there. He began painting abstract paintings in acrylic in 1967 using underlying grids and basic geometric forms: circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, etc. with an emphasis on color relationships.
Jackson received a number of awards including: 47th Bartlett Traveling Fellow (SMFA) 1964; grant and fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, MA, ’67, ’68; Boskop Foundation Grant, ’71; Mass.
Council for the Arts and Humanities; Somerville, Mass. Arts Council, ’83. He has shown his work at Cornell University; Tufts University; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Boston Cyclorama; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Ma; Brockton At Center, Brockton, MA; City Hall, Boston; FAWC, Provincetown, Ma; Provincetown Art Association; and numerous other venues. His work is in many public and private collections.
From 1974 until 1990, Jackson and his wife the artist Joan Wye owned and operated Belfast Bay Tileworks, located in the ‘artists and artisans building’, 20 Vernon St, Somerville, MA. There they designed and manufactured art tiles for commercial and residential use. Their tiles are installed in hundreds of residences, businesses, government buildings, schools and public art in the Northeast and across the country. For the decade: 1977 -1986, he gave up painting to concentrate on tile as a medium and to run the tile business.
Jackson took up painting again in 1987 and continues to paint to this day, working and living in the town of Vinalhaven on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. Joan and he moved there in 1990 from the Boston area. Joan died in 2006.
