BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) will present a conversation with artist Frank Jackson on Friday, Sept. 16, at 7 p.m.
Jackson will join BMAC Director of Exhibitions Sarah Freeman to talk about “There/There,” an exhibit of abstract landscape paintings made with fresco on burlap.
Jackson and Freeman will discuss the artist's technical process and how it informs his work. The medium of fresco is a painting process in which hand-ground pigments are embedded in a thin, wet lime layer called the intonaco layer.
To create the works featured in “There/There,” Jackson forgoes the structural layers typically used in fresco and goes straight to the intonaco, which means that he must work quickly.
“Fresco is a time-sensitive material, and the element of time adds an urgency to the process and nudges me to explore color, form, and space in a spontaneous way that is akin to the act of responsive drawing,” Jackson said in a news release.
“The imagery, too, is developed from the act of drawing and my sense of intuition about building off the initial shape of the intonaco that I've troweled on the burlap,” he added. “Light is an important component for me because it indicates the time of day and the passage of time, which, in my mind, also relates to the arc of connection I'm trying to make between the imagined and felt, and the real and tangible.”
Jackson's work has been exhibited at Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Williams College Museum of Art, the Shed, Robert Blackburn printmaking studio gallery 20/20 in New York, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, among others.
He teaches studio art at Buxton School in Williamstown, Mass. He has taught at Williams College and the Rhode Island School of Design and served as a dean at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California at Davis and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University.
This in-person talk is free and open to the public. Space is limited. Register at brattleboromuseum.org or 802-257-0124, ext. 101.
“There/There” is on view at BMAC through Oct. 10.