Page 58 - The Hunt - Fall 2022

seem to share Jackson’s dislike for chit-chat. Jackson tells the story of being
at one opening in New York and asking the gallery director about a gentleman who’d suddenly left the show. “Oh,” she said, “he’s one of your collectors.”
Robert Jackson was born in 1964
in Kinston, North Carolina, one
of five sons born to Nan and Ned Jackson, the latter a former DuPont plant manager and later vice president in charge of fibers. Those who became VPs
at the once massive chemical company were transferred from location to location. “Each of the five brothers was born in a different place,” Jackson says.
Jackson attended Brandywine High School, where he met his wife, Suzanne, who sang for 25 years with the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center. She now teaches voice, dance, acting
Jackson’s career has flourished because he paints the way he wants to. “I want to have a distinctive voice,” he says.
56 THE HUNT MAGAZINE fall 2022
and yoga at her Kennett Square studio, The Awakening Arts.
Both attended the University of Delaware, where Jackson studied to be an engineer like his father. When he turned to painting his senior year, his professor encouraged him
to get a master’s degree. “He said I’d have to teach or find another way to make a living if I wanted to be a painter,” Jackson recalls.
“I was very naïve. I didn’t realize that most artists have day jobs or a trust fund or a spouse to support them and their families.”
He decided that if he had to have a day job, it would be as an engineer—and he’d paint on the side. That took him and Suzanne to Hanover, Maryland, where he got a job
with Motorola. But his painting suffered, and he quit in 1996 after five years. “I couldn’t imagine a whole life in the corporate environment,” he says. “Suzanne was terrified of what that meant for us, as we were getting ready to have a kid.”
A pastor at his local church presented him with an alternative: a job as assistant pastor. “I decided I’d go into the ministry for a year,” Jackson says.
He ended up staying on for five, painting in his free time. “I hate what Christianity seems to represent today,” he says. “ I’m thinking about taking that off my resume.”
Jackson gradually began earning a living as a traditional artist painting traditional scenes.