Thomas Jackson
Oyster River Pages: What is the most challenging aspect of your artistic process?
Thomas Jackson: Leaning into the spontaneity of creation is a paradigm shift when starting off. Ideas hit truly when you least expect. I’ve had concepts leap into my mind and have pulled off the highway into a gas station to get the exact lines or the ideas down. I’ve done u-turns to pull up to a view I passed. This commanding influence of the creative bug is a challenge for the busy academic semester schedule, but it’s also the most exciting.
ORP: What do you think is the best way to improve writing and/or artistic skills?
TJ: When I captured on film the photos featured in this issue I was on a walk with friends in Umstead Park in Raleigh. It was a disposable 35mm black and white camera, which of course meant a one and done capture. I recognized while shooting that I would not see exactly how well I captured the scene. The grainy haze of the film also added a magical ambience to a view that helped enhance even the least successful. I saw the view of light illuminating a stand of trees and I truly held my camera at eye level and pressed to shoot. I think art loses its soul when it’s contrived, when too much attention is put into exactly the right angles and trying to capture a photorealistic scene, it crosses the line into uncanny valley. Too many nature shots are devoid of natural accuracy as we humans feel the need to orient the lines in a rigid structured order that nature does not conform to. The best way to improve your artistic skills is to give in to the rough messiness early on, keep track of your approaches, changing certain methods with each first attempt, and then evaluate what worked. Giving in to randomness and disorder allows you to walk the piece back so that it bears your fingerprint, while still sitting firm in the realm of disorder.
ORP: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
TJ: Sylvia Plath is a vital figure for me, most pertinently her poems “Tulips” and “Poppies In July” are some of the darkest poems on flowers I have ever read, and I will forever be in awe of the darkness she imbued each piece with. Tulips aren’t pretty, decorative flowers, their bright red color is offensive and rageful and it offends and upsets her in the sterile hospital environment. Flowers are grief, rage, trauma, memory. I aim to always pair my most beautiful descriptions and shots with a dark air. My piece “ghostly trees” is not just white glowing tree stands, it’s spectral, supernatural, otherworldly, sparse, and barren. How it looked standing in the moment suggested this meaning, but the dark lens filtering it allowed the glowing atmosphere to form a fog. I love that added tinge of a sort of gothic revival, tapping into the sublime.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
TJ: Vulnerability to me is the proximity between the poetic persona and your lived experience. To hold that persona so close to your life and its traumas and struggles and also inner hopes and dreams is a daunting task. Even a diaristic poem is a persona, because try as we all may to be objective, writing about our own lives through our own eyes is subjective, there are very few poems where the author completely character assassinates themselves. The persona is a cushion dulling someone’s failings to affirm the point of view of the poem’s speaker. Same thing in photography, the images created are a unique point of view brought to a situation. A mountain photo is not just A mountain, it’s how the light hit, how the season changed it, the angle from which it was shot are all unique to the photographer. It is MY moment with THE mountain, it’s how I saw it. This vulnerability to create an art piece that is truly unique allows art to move people emotionally.
