Billy Morrow Jackson

Billy Morrow Jackson (1926-2006) was an American painter.

Jackson was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1926. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis, and later expected an MFA from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he far along taught. Over the course of his education, Mr. Jackson was taught by Max Beckmann, Fred Conway and Abraham Rattner. In addition to the Bureau of Reclamation's commission, Mr. Jackson conventional several extra government commissions. These include paintings for NASA to cassette the Apollo look program, and paintings in the own up capitol buildings of Olympia, Washington and Springfield, Illinois.

All of the paintings that he completed for the Bureau of Reclamation are watercolors, however, Mr. Jackson is probably bigger known for his oils of the Midwest. After start in printmaking, specifically woodcuts and lithographs, he made the shift to painting with Still Life past Postage Stamp in 1955. The expressionism and flat, two-dimensional, patterned prints of his earlier years gave artifice to increasing naturalism. Realism as a reaction adjoining Abstract Expressionism gained a significant like starting in the late 1960s, the most visible of the leisure interest being the photorealists and the super-realists, artists such as Richard Estes and Chuck Close. While Billy Morrow Jackson was agreed painting in a realist manner, his use of ambiguity (imperfect or unfriendly lines, for example) and his use of light for compositional purposes also linked him to the historic American Luminist college of the 19th century. The Luminists tended to depict landscape scenes (in the tradition of John Constable and Joseph M. W. Turner) with a indulgent sensibility, much in imitation of Jackson was doing. The expose is a dominant feature in many of Jackson's paintings, pushing the horizon line the length of towards the bottom of the canvas. The blank fields and solitary farm houses impart a prudence of vastness and expanse that is enhanced by his use of perspective. Some of Jackson's higher works moved indoors, where he exploited walls and doors to impart severity as with ease as employing perspective. Jackson's paintings remember the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper in their use of truth to convey feelings of distancing and vastness.

Jackson died in 2006.

 This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the Bureau of Reclamation.