Cloistered Image

Billy Morrow Jackson

Cloistered Image was created on the verge of Billy Morrow Jackson’s transition from printmaker to painter, and in his choice of color reduction woodcut he’s begun to bridge the gap between these two mediums, finding a painterly texture within this carved and printed image of a bouquet on a tabletop. He would go on to become a master of realist watercolors and oil paintings, one of the artists of the post-Abstract era who began to focus on representational imagery that verged on hyper-realistic, especially of flora and landscapes. In 1955, however, he was already a master of color, using a neutral palette within the Modernist composition so as to illuminate what already exists in nature, rather than to outshine it.