IN PERSPECTIVE
Paint People
AN EXHIBITION devoted to the work of Oliver Lee Jackson is currently on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum through February 20, 2022. The show spans five years of the American artist’s career, showcasing 12 paintings, drawings, and prints created from the mid-1960s through 2020. Viewers have the opportunity to trace the evolution of the artist, a St. Louis native, who works in abstraction but incorporates figurative elements.
Jackson refers to the figures that populate his fields of abstraction and vibrant color as “paint people.” They create a sense of movement, intensity, and deep meaning in his engrossing work. Jack-son draws on Western art traditions from the Renaissance through the 20th century to create what he describes as an “African sensibility.”
Jackson was born in 1935. He became a member of the Black Artists Group, which was founded in St. Louis in 1968. The artist was close to the celebrated jazz saxophonist Julius Hemphill, and his love and admiration for jazz in general is palpable in the improvisatory and rhythmic nature of his paintings. In 1971, Jackson moved to California, where he still lives today.
Among the earliest works in the show are paintings from Jackson’s Sharpeville series, dating to the early 1970s. In the series, Jackson references the massacre of 69 peaceful protestors in the South African township of Sharpeville in 1960. In Sharpeville Series VIII, a 1973 acrylic paint, applied fabric, and mixed media on cotton canvas, an arc of dynamic figures tumble through a white ground outlined in red.
In Alchemy, a 1977 oil and silvery enamel paint on canvas, paint people are almost hidden in the composition at first; they streak across the canvas like amorphous shapes, blending into the energetic streaks and dots of paint that punctuate the work. Untitled, a water-color dated to 1989 and another highlight of the show, features paint people in bright colors. Jackson renders them as outlines seeping deeply into the composition.
The works of, a 2004 work of oil paints, oil enamel, applied linen, mixed media on gessoed linen and , a 2009 painting of oil-based pigments on gessoed linen, find Jackson filling his canvases more completely and intensely. He often paints his large-scale pictures on the floor, and the physicality of this method is palpable in the works them-selves. In , a 2020 work of oilbased paints, chalk, and fixative on gessoed panel, figures seem to dance and rise out of passages of intense linework, surrounded by fields of orange-gold.
