TOM JACKSON – SALT LAKE CITY, UT

“Night Watch”

Acrylic stucco and construction board

61” X 12” X 5”

$2,500

I have a theory. A child’s imagination is free from all the adult constraints we place on it. Up until about the age of ten or eleven years old, everything is possible to a child: Elephants can fly, rabbits can talk, and monsters good and bad live under the bed. The entertainment business has made fortunes off a child’s imagination. When a child creates art, they do it without constraints. We praise everything they do and hang it on the refrigerator door. Then puberty kicks in. They become self-conscious. Now they have to color between the lines; become an adult. Elephants can no longer fly, and rabbits can’t talk. They lose some of their creative freedom. Some call it the “inner child” that we have suppressed inside us as adults. It is a child’s ”freedom to imagine whatever,” that I am striving for in all the art I do. 

Meet the Artist

Tom Jackson was born in Salt Lake City, UT, and now lives and works in his home and studio in Cottonwood Heights, UT. He first recalls making art at the age of six, creating and painting colorful rock collections with his mom. As a high school student, he won “Best of Show” at state art competitions, then drifted away from art while earning a degree in speech communications from the University of Utah. After 20 years in the corporate world, he quit his job and set out on a full-time career as an artist, which he has pursued for the past three decades. First working primarily with stone and welded metal, he crafted numerous pieces for private collections and public display. Today he creates sculptures out of composite materials, drawing on the imagination of his childhood for inspiration. He believes that the shapes he employs are visitors from another world – a magical world where anything is possible.