Keith Jackson, The Architects, 2024. Oil on canvas, 84 × 72 inches. Photo: Daniel Greer.
For Keith Jackson, painting is an exercise in self-discovery and self-determination. Combing through his family’s history—documented in photographs and anecdotes and bolstered by his and his siblings’ memories of growing up in a rural farm town in Missouri—Jackson creates striking figurative paintings imbued with personal and collective significance. Though drawing inspiration from real life, he takes creative liberties with the details, incorporating images from different sources and elements that deviate from reality altogether, such as a vibrant chartreuse sky. Parsing Jackson’s work is not unlike the process of recalling a memory in which a visual archive whittled by time brings to the fore an image that seems believable but can never be the real thing.
