Leslie Gillette Jackson

"My Living Space: a strange geometry."

Leslie Gillette Jackson, painter, poet, celebrates her 90th birthday. Happy birthday, Leslie!

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Black Sun" ink drawing

"Black Sun"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Black Windows"

"Black Windows"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "City at Night"

"City at Night"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Windowed Wall"

"Windowed Wall"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Dream City"

"Dream City"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Open City"

"Open City"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Plaza"

"Plaza"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Scaffolding"

"Scaffolding"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, "Sleeping Windows"

"Sleeping Windows"

Leslie Gillette Jackson, born in Rochester, N.Y. is a painter and poet. She studied at Swarthmore College, received a degree in Latin American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and received an M.F.A. from the University of California in Berkeley, in 1952. Her early art work, in woodcuts in particular, began with several extended stays in Mexico in the 1940's. She spent two years painting in France (Paris, Strasbourg) in the 1960's; and six months in Russia (Leningrad [St. Petersburg] in 1974) focusing on Russian icons and architecture (her "Drawings of Leningrad" were exhibited at the Folger Library in Washington D.C. in 1975). She has had various one-person shows, with many in Italy. Her prints, drawings and watercolors have been exhibited nationally.

Leslie Jackson's teaching experience includes classes in drawing and painting for thirty years at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill as well as twenty at the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven. She has also taught several college seminars--in drawing and Russian avant-garde art--at Yale University. Her two small collections of poetry and drawings are entitled, A Poet in Spain and A Strange Light ."

Established since the sixties in her winter and spring barn-studio in Guilford, Connecticut, and since the eighties in her summer and autumn studio in Truro, Leslie Jackson works in acrylic and water-color, as well as in ink, pencil, crayon and collage. She is well-known, too, for her "icons" and triptychs--works on wood that combine carving, ink, acrylic, and collage, and that engage mythopoetic themes.

Her art lies somewhere between realism and abstraction. Its themes are varied, and find their sources from direct or inner observation. Sometimes poetry or even fragmentary words may be its starting-point, but this art of known and unknown cities, deserts, mountains, maps, ancient harbors, and rivers, is never intended to illustrate; rather it seeks to establish inner relationships between word and image, actuality and imagination.

Leslie Gillette Jackson

T e s t i m o n i a l

Aleksis Rannit** on the Art of Leslie Jackson

IN THESE YEARS of pretentious but empty restlessness it is good to listen to a Klee, to a Braque, to a Tobey, to a Morandi, those who themselves listened to the pictures they were creating. One of these very attentive and responsive listeners today is Leslie Jackson. Her style is unobtrusive because she is absorbed in meditation on a subject pertaining to the idea of not oppressing but, on the contrary, serving the work of art. For that reason her pictures are actually devotional objects and images--Andachtsbilder.

I do not know anything about the artist's religion but her work shows us clearly that even if we can do without religion, we cannot do without faith. It is faith of transcendental significance and poetical earnestness, which Leslie Jackson expresses by means of a whisper, knowing well that in whispering one can achieve the great depth of space. The reverent admiration which she brings in this exhibition [La Pigna Gallery, Rome, February 2-16, 1980] to the Greek world is manifested through prayers and offerings in the form of her specific lines colors, and light-volumina as precious objects. They indicate the artist's obligating personal bond to both material and immaterial reality; they define the individual, active, voluntary aspects of worship as opposed to the collective legalistic position of an organized art movement or a systematic school of philosophy.

At the margins and outside the orbits of artificially monumental expression, Leslie Jackson remains in her language and thought essentially in the sphere of personal or private spirituality. Hers is a subtlety of artistic vision, a rare balance of symbolization, humanistic and aesthetic. The mythopoetic and religious element is expressed in her work not only thematically but in the choice of subject, which is not the means towards some ulterior descriptive end, but an ideal existential end in itself.

**Aleksis Rannit (1914-85), Estonian poet, critic, and historian of art. Curator of the Slavic and East European Collection, Yale University (1961-85). From the Catalogue for Leslie Jackson's Exhibition at La Pigna , Rome, Italy, 1980.

LESLIE GILLETTE JACKSON

ONE PERSON EXHIBITS

ITALY

Bergamo

Studio Gianfranco Guerra, 1980

Pavia

"Convivium," conference at Liceo Borromeo, September 1986

Rome

Galleria "La Pigna," 1980, 1984, 1989

Marano Principato, Calabria

Grand Prize and Exhibit, Premio Pandosia, 1987

RUSSIA

Moscow

State Literary Museum A.P. Chekhov 1990

U.S.A.

Chatham, Massachusetts, 2002

Munson Gallery

Henniker, MA.

New England College Gallery, 2003

New London, Connecticut

New London Art Society Gallery, 2000

North Truro, Massachusetts

School House Gallery, 1982, 1988, 1989

New York City

Seneres on Sixth, 1987

New Haven, Connecticut

Ezra Stiles College (Yale University), 1962, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1986

Trumbull College (Yale University),1979

Ross-Talalay Gallery,1961, 1984

Lyman Center, University of Southern Connecticut, 1991

Seattle, Washington

Solomon Fine Art, 2001

Swarthmore, Pennsylvania

List Gallery, Swarthmore College,1997

Truro, Massachusetts

COA Gallery, 1997

Wellfleet, Massachusetts

Bragazzi Gallery,1966

Left Bank Gallery,1973, 1975, 1976

Washington, D.C.

Folger Shakespeare Gallery, 1975

Provincetown, Massachusetts

Gallery 407, 1960

Paul Kessler Gallery, 1965, 1970

Prints, drawings, and watercolors have been included in national shows, such as those of the Society of American Graphic Artists, Library of Congress, and the American Watercolor Society.

TEACHING

Truro Center for the Arts, Castle Hill, Truro, Massachusetts

Drawing, Painting, since 1977

Yale University, College Seminars:

The Art of Drawing (spring1979, fall,1980)

Russian avant-garde Art,1905-1925 (spring 1985, fall 1992)

Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, Connecticut

Drawing, Painting 1960-1980

LECTURES

Since 1970 at Amherst College, Northwestern University, Columbia University, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Connecticut College, Southern Connecticut State University, and elsewhere:

"St. Petersburg. City of Art"

"What is an Icon?"

"The Icon and Constructivism"

"Drawings for 'The Divine Comedy' of Dante Alighieri: Botticelli to Rauschenberg"

"Drawing as a Trace of an Action"

"Architectural Drawing and the Fantastic Imagination"

"The Making of a Painting: Kazimir Malevich's 'Englishman in Moscow'"

"Naum Gabo: a Sculpture at a Crossroads"

"Word and Image and the Poetry of George Seferis"

"Ivanov and Ciurlionis: the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts"

"What is Expressionism?"

"Russian Futurism: Word and Image"

"Poetry from a Dune Shack, Provincetown"

EDUCATION

Swarthmore College, class of 1942

B.A. Latin American Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1943

Courses toward M.A. in Slavic Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1949-1950

M.F.A. Painting, University of California Berkeley, 1953

Printmaking with Harry Sternberg, Seong Moy, Gabor Peterdi, Carol Summers

Fourteen months' writing and studying in Mexico,1940's; two years painting in France (Paris, Strasbourg), 1962, 1968; six months in the Soviet Union (Leningrad [St. Petersburg], Moscow), 1974, studying icons and church architecture, working on "Drawings of Leningrad" (exhibited in Folger Library, Washington, D.C., 1975).

PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

College Art Association, New York

Center for Independent Study, New Haven, Connecticut

Istituto Superiore "Beato Angelico" di Studi per l'Arte Sacra, Rome

PUBLICATIONS

"[Vjacedslav] Ivanov's Ciurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of the Arts" in Vjaceslav lvanov, Russischer Dichter, Europäische Kulturphilosoph , Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, Germany, 1993.

A Strange Light, Shank Painter Printing Co., Provincetown, MA 1997 (Poems and Drawings by Leslie Jackson)

Poet in Spain , Shank Painter Printing Co., Provincetown, MA,1997 (Poems and

Drawings by Leslie Jackson)