Artists Talk: Vanessa Jackson RA – Friday, 28 February: 6.30 to 8.30pm

We were delighted to host the artist Vanessa Jackson RA during her talk on her work at The Essential School of Painting. The talk followed by a question and answer session hosted by ESOP artist-tutor Dan Coombs.

Vanessa Jackson, on first reading, appears to take the most formal approach to painting, but her use of geometry and its three dimensional function deny the supposed flatness of modernist space. Jackson’s work explores the contradiction of a fully realised space at once pertaining to logic and completeness and uncertainty and unease. The ornamental and optical play of colour acts to both confirm and confuse our sense of perception, constantly shifting between concrete presence and the ambiguity of space beyond our grasp. Jackson destabilises the very ‘ground’ we most desire, a sense of security and belonging

North House Gallery Exhibition 2- 30 March 2013

Vanessa Jackson was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts 2 September 2015. A graduate of Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art. In 1985 and 1990, she undertook the Yaddo Residency in to New York. Jackson has an extensive career teaching fine art. She was Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art from 1988 to 1997, MA and research tutor at the Royal College of Art 1992 -2009, and senior tutor at the Royal Academy Schools from 1998 to 2013. She is currently a member of the fine art faculty at the British School at Rome for which she was previously awarded the Abbey Fellowship in 1995 and is the Chair of the Edwin Austin Abbey Council, which provides awards for painters.

In 1998-9, Jackson was included in the South Bank Centre‘s exhibition The Presence of Painting. Her oil on canvas painting So Much Depends (image left) was a prizewinner at John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 1993-4.

All images copyright © vanessa jackson 2020 all rights reserved. Used with consent of the artist.