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 established an MFA from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he innovative 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 usual several extra government commissions. These supplement paintings for NASA to stamp album the Apollo reveal program, and paintings in the make a clean breast 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 improved known for his oils of the Midwest. After start in printmaking, specifically woodcuts and lithographs, he made the shift to painting with Still Life once Postage Stamp in 1955. The expressionism and flat, two-dimensional, patterned prints of his earlier years gave mannerism to increasing naturalism. Realism as a reaction adjacent to Abstract Expressionism gained a significant once 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 definitely painting in a realist manner, his use of ambiguity (imperfect or unfriendly lines, for example) and his use of vivacious for compositional purposes also united him to the historic American Luminist hypothetical of the 19th century. The Luminists tended to depict landscape scenes (in the tradition of John Constable and Joseph M. W. Turner) with a tender sensibility, much taking into consideration Jackson was doing. The space is a dominant feature in many of Jackson's paintings, pushing the horizon line beside towards the bottom of the canvas. The blank fields and solitary farm houses impart a wisdom of vastness and expanse that is enhanced by his use of perspective. Some of Jackson's well ahead works moved indoors, where he exploited walls and doors to impart height as capably as employing perspective. Jackson's paintings recall the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper in their use of authenticity to convey feelings of unfriendliness and vastness.

Jackson died in 2006.

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