Cover Artist: Jackson Hammack

By Gina Malone

Jackson Hammack began painting before he started school. He was three or four at the time. And though the day for attending school and for choosing a career did come, he still felt the pull to create. “I would paint after work in a hot attic of a friend’s house,” he says, “laying large canvases on the attic floor. I still paint with a canvas laid on the floor or a table. This allows me to puddle the paint and build up layers.”

Hammack is self-taught and draws inspiration from a lifetime spent close to nature in the various places his military family moved through the years. “We lived in the mountains of Nevada which were high desert dotted with sagebrush, and very fragrant,” he says. “We also lived in Spokane, WA, before Dad finally retired in 1969, when we moved to northwest Arkansas on 100 acres outside of Eureka Springs which is a beautiful small town nestled in the Ozark Mountains.” It was a time, Hammack says, when hippies were moving to the area, many of them artists who were setting up shop on the sidewalks and in small studios. “To this day, their creative energy has influenced me, as well as the gorgeous mountains of that region,” he says. There, he hiked, fished and swam in Beaver Lake, skipping school when the bass were running in the White River.

He attended the University of Arkansas, then moved to Tulsa, OK, and began working for the airline industry. His career would take him to Dallas, TX, where he lived for 30 years before retiring and moving to Black Mountain in 2019. “I fell in love with Asheville and WNC the very first moment I saw these mountains way on back,” he says. “These mountains are special and, I believe, hold ancient wisdom.”

Since moving to WNC, he says, the natural world has had a calming effect as well as inspiring him creatively. “Distanced from the chaotic busy world of cities and airports, I can now focus on the native fauna as subjects,” he says. The roadrunners he painted in the past now share space on the canvas with woodpeckers. “Large canvases make room for bear, deer and elk,” Hammack says. “Not as they actually appear, but as I interpret them. I especially concentrate on the eyes as they are portals of their life force and innocence. The eyes invite the viewer to reconnect with the natural world that we originate from.”

Hammack had just returned from a trip to Australia, with hikes in Tasmania and the Blue Mountains, when COVID began impacting the US. “I went into my new studio and painted and painted and painted,” he says, “as if that time unleashed and opened the door to be more still and creative. To date, since that time, I have painted 230 paintings.”

His work is represented regionally at The Lucy Clark Gallery & Studio, in Brevard. “Jack’s work is hard to place in a box,” says gallery owner Lucy Clark. “His pieces fit into a multitude of homes, with their rich colors and imagery bringing life to cabins or contemporary homes. It has been an absolute delight to represent his work and watch customers light up when they dive deep into the multi-layers of his process.”

Hammack paints on wood panels and uses mixed media, oil, latex, crayon, pencil, metal paint and house paint. “I scratch, scrape, use a brush or stick, and pour on the wood panels, resulting in a texture that brings much interest to the painting,” he says. “My work is modern and naïve at the same time. Animals and birds visit me almost every day and throughout the day when I paint, and I have a beautiful view of the Great Craggy Mountains from my studio and backyard, inspiring my painting and giving me volumes of inspiration for years to come.”

Jackson Hammack Art is located at Ravenscroft Studio in Black Mountain. His work is represented regionally at The Lucy Clark Gallery & Studio, Brevard. To learn more, visit JacksonHammackArt.com, find on Instagram @Jackson Hammack or call 214.477.0902. To learn more about The Lucy Clark Gallery & Studio, visit LucyClarkGallery.com.