"Painting is an elaborate accident.
All I know is that sometimes in one’s daily life the world will acquire a kind of charge – and that this charge is indistinguishable from the obligation to make a picture. Some things jut out as potentially art-worthy. This is all the basis required to begin.
That obligation is mysterious, and I hope it will remain so. Art needs to be mystical, since it must explore what we can’t account for.
The iPad is the perfect medium in which to react to the rapidly unfolding strangeness of contemporary life; to consider the shifts of light and the spray of water; the micro-expressions of people; and the rush of experience.
But it is only a starting-point towards the physical work, which begins with the selection of aluminium, copper, lightbox, canvas or paper as the physical context of the work. The process then involves the application of collage, spray paint, gold leaf, or pencil and paint to create unique pieces.
Today, we are pitched between the meta and the real, the physical and the digital, our online and offline lives. Art is about finding a new accommodation, grounded in beauty, with the essentially hybrid nature of our lives. Many of us are unsated by the structures of life today: it’s important for art to make us happier."
British author Christopher A. Jackson established his identity as a painter in early 2021. His visual works cover a wide range of subjects and incorporate different materials such as computer graphics, aluminium, acrylic paint, and gold leaf. Over the years, Jackson’s paintings have attracted praise from well-known figures including Sir Anthony Seldon, Gina Miller, Paul Joyce, Philip Mould, Lord Dennis Stevenson, Sir Tom Stoppard, Baroness Frances d’Souza, Gemma Levine and Alison Brackenbury.
In late 2022, Jackson began producing physical paintings, using his digital drawings on the Procreate app - the software program used by David Hockney for his work. The aim is to create a new dialogue between the virtual image and physical reality. To this end, Jackson teamed up both commercially and creatively with Rebecca Man-yuk Yeung, a mediaeval art historian and expert in the finance and crypto aspects of art. Jackson and his studio regard the iPad image as a starting point for an exciting journey into new aspects of the physical world involving gilding, spray painting, metallic pencil drawing and collage.
Jackson continues to attract notice as a poet and biographer, and appears regularly on TV in the UK on the BBC, Sky, Bloomberg, LBC, discussing politics and literature. His painting sometimes touches on politics and his journalistic background: for instance, the picture of Lucian Freud’s studio could only have been arrived at by a practising journalist who happened to visit Freud’s house for an interview. Jackson often pairs his work with a written record of the image or a poem. A comprehensive catalogue which includes the artist's visual works and their literal counterparts will be available through Northside Press in 2023.