Backback

Roy Jackson was born in London, and has lived and worked in Australia since 1959. He studied under Godfrey Miller in evening classes at East Sydney Technical College and with Wollongong artist Ron Lambert, whom he met on the ship coming out to Australia in 1959. He returned to London to study in the 1960s, and has shown his work in solo and group exhibitions in Australia since 1967. He has undertaken a number of residencies overseas including at the Australia Council Studio in New York (1978) and the Power Studio at the Cité in Paris (1994). He has won numerous prizes including the Fishers Ghost Purchase Prize (Campbelltown City Art Gallery) in 1995 and the Mosman Art Prize in 2002. There is a retrospective of his work planned for 2013 at the Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra.

'Backback' is from a group of drawings that take as their starting point a piece of door hardware, which is immediately transformed through layered tonal and linear marks in oilstick and pastel. "...These marks, unforced, intuitive and spontaneously generated as instinctively space and paced" (T. Maloon, 'Roy Jackson' Defiance Gallery catalogue, 2013). Firmly grounded in the material world, they evoke still life as well as dappled light and movement, with an energetic pictorial surface, vigorously executed.