Watercolor, paper, mixed media

Contemporary blue, gray, and yellow abstract seascape painting by Houston, TX artist Jonathan Paul Jackson. The work features a boat sailing on the ocean with a turbulent gray cloud overhead. The phrase "from kings to barefoot slaves" is written in Jackson's iconic cursive handwriting in the upper right corner. Currently hung in a solid black floating frame with white matting.

Jonathan Paul Jackson (b. 1984) Jonathan Paul Jackson is an African American Visual Artist from Houston, Texas. He works in all mediums of Art, including Painting, Sculpture and Illustration. At the age of 11, he completed his first large-scale painting, and by the age of 16, he was showing in coffee shops in the Houston area. Jackson has some formal education in art, but is mostly self-taught. At the age of 19, he curated his first show with two established artists, painter J. Antonio Farfan and photographer Daniel Kayne. His fabric and stitched art was his first full series, which included 25 pieces, which was displayed at Cafe Brazil in Houston, Texas in 2006. In 2008, Jackson started curating art shows for fellow visual artist, putting his own art career to the side for a couple of years, but he never stopped sketching and drawing. In 2011, he returned to his art, producing a series of oil pastel works jazz greats, political figures and everyday objects. His other works involve experimenting in Neo-Expressionism on a series of action paintings. His paintings range from a series of color studies or what he has come to call “Color Meditations , in which he experimented with color while researching the masters of color, Matisse, Warhol and Gauguin, he soon realized that it was not the colors they used to create the work but how they applied the paint/color to the surface that truly defined them as "Masters of Color." In 2016, Jackson began a series of paintings entitled Indigenous Contemporary. When he started studying different indigenous sculptures and cultures, he fell in love in with the meanings and the storytelling. To celebrate the new-found love, he created paintings of where his imagination went when was reading about the cultures. This particular exhibition of paintings is based on studies of various indigenous cultures, including African, Latin and North America sculptures and culture. What I want the series to accomplish is to create interest in the viewer to be more inclined to go spend more time in the artifacts section of art museums, because if we understand the art of the past it helps us understand and create art for the future. Indigenous Contemporary Volume 2 is the second installment of the series. In Volume 2 of the series, he adds technology to the process of creating the paintings, using Photoshop software to alter photos of indigenous sculptures and of my own paintings and drawings, then using a wide-format printer to make enlargements of the altered photos. Applying these technologies, he wants to bridge the gap between the past and the future. If we understand the art of the past, it helps us understand and create art for the future.

H 50.56 in. x W 38 in. x D 1.75 in.

H 45.5 in. x W 33 in.