Henry Jackson’s mastery of color and composition rank him as a highly regarded contemporary abstract expressionist painter. His paintings evince both a let-loose freedom and a finely disciplined process producing encomiums of enduring beauty for the eye as well as the mind. While they reference the figure, Jackson’s works resist specificity or realism. When they appear, his figures seem perfectly imperfect, apparitions of personhood suspended within elemental, nonphysical environments of kaleidoscopic color and variegated texture. Jackson says of this intentional lack of identifiable feature or form, “Shapes emerge and perish almost simultaneously within their environment, and this revealing does not come easy…. What remains from this exhaustive struggle are agitated, irreducible forms. This tearing down of the figure is where I begin to see truth.” Jackson’s art reveals a multifaceted tension between various impulses: figuration and abstraction, instinct and intention, body and spirit. These impulses contribute to a sense of unearthing: rather than literal records of Jackson’s thoughts or observations, his paintings attend to inner, elemental truths or emotions that, otherwise indefinable, could only have been freed through paint. Their spirit is illuminated through inner explorations and expressed by Jackson through emanations in oil and cold wax. A San Francisco native and resident, Jackson studied fine art, design, and psychology at San Francisco State University and the California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. Jackson’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous prominent museums, including De Sassait Museum in Santa Clara, California and the Boise Art Museum in Boise, Idaho, among others.