I find myself thinking about Bob Jackson and the fact that he’s 75 years old more often than I’d like to admit. I guess, because he looks to be about 20 years younger than that. Or, perhaps it’s simply awe. To be making fun art for so long. To be more youthful, as a septuagenarian, than I am, approaching 30. To have so much life and to cherish it, but not take any of it too seriously.
Bob runs one of the drawing classes at Philadelphia’s Plastic Club and when I asked if I could convoview him about his art, he said “sure” and invited me up to the visit the PCEH, the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness. I know: it didn’t seem to make sense to me either.
He gave me the tour of the facilities, told me about the process of getting showers and clean clothes to hundreds of homeless men every day. The focus is on enabling them to find work through these basic but pivotal luxuries most of us take for granted: like cleanliness, a mail box, and appropriate attire. He showed me the extensive collection of clothes he had categorized and boxed himself and told me about the annual art auction that brought in a significant amount of money to the PCEH. I happen to have an interest in the world of nonprofit work, so I was enchanted. But, I didn’t quite understand why he was showing me this instead of his art.
Then, I met Phyllis. Bob’s wife is the director of the PCEH and shares a small office in the back of the building with two others who are helping run Safe Home, the other endeavor from the same organization. In the midst of evident busyness, Phyllis sat 
down and talked to me for about 40 minutes on the philosophy and methods behind PCEH and Safe Home. Basically, that what homeless people need are…well…homes. Beautiful in its simplicity.
I was impressed, I took notes, suddenly I felt like I was writing up a story for the newspaper. But I wasn’t. I had come to talk to Bob Jackson about his artistic process. Yet, somehow, it was as if, to know Bob Jackson, you had to know more than his art. You had to know that he is long retired, yet spends almost every day of the week volunteering for PCEH. And to know Bob Jackson, you have to know Phyllis, the woman with silver hair and a dimpled smile, who seems just the slightest bit preoccupied, probably because she is trying to end homelessness in Philadelphia. Seriously. The independent spirit of PCEH and Safe Home posed beautifully before me: it was the same spirit that I was setting out to capture in Philthy Art.
It was a couple weeks later, when Rick Wright and I visited their house out in Haddonfield, NJ that the second half of the convoview took place. It was then that I got to finally experience Bob Jackson’s art.
Bob and Phyllis invited us in and the first thing I remember seeing was walls and shelves filled with intricate and plentiful art. Big art, small art, memorabilia, pieces of life from other places, sculpture…and this was just the dining room. Beyond that the living room, the patio room, the upstairs…all covered with interesting pieces that drew you in. And the more you looked around, the more you realized you had missed a little piece here or there. And somehow it didn’t feel cluttered or overwhelming. Just…fascinating…like walking into a well-stocked but tiny museum, run by curators with an eye for the eclectic, quirky, and warm…for the forgotten, diminished, overlooked, funny and beautiful details of life.
So, it didn’t surprise me when Rick and I were lead down to Bob’s workshop and it was filled with his own eclectic, quirky and brilliant sculptures. I wish I had a better vocabulary for these things…but here’s what I can relate about Bob’s process.
Imagine dozens of long drawers filled with…well, junk.
Knick-knacks, buttons, doll parts, small toys, anything strange and interesting…or mundane…the remnants of someone’s childhood from 1950s or 1980s. The best Bob can say about his process is that it just sort of happens. To me, it sounds like automatic writing. He goes through the drawers and starts to collect, without much analysis, the pieces that will come together to form a new invention. I imagine a hand, heated with purpose, gliding over the hundreds of possible pieces, stopping suddenly when the right one is recognized by some sort of mystical radar. Freud might say it was just the subconscious doing its work. Either way, what is created is something both meaningful and conscious.
At first glance, Bob’s pieces seem nostalgic, representing a time when he was growing up in the ’40s and ’50s. And indeed, he openly admits to missing those simpler times. But his work is too smart to run on simple nostalgia. There is humor, irony, the grotesque, and the alienated in these pieces. There is also the cherished, the golden, and the longed for. Surrealism is here, and representations of time and popular culture bound up with a social commentary that is subtle and delightful and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Often the presentation engages the human form, turning a box, a doll’s head, old postcards, and dozens of other small and expressive items into both a body that maps the past.
Check out the Bob Jackson page to see a slide show of his work with photographs taken by Rick Wright.
If you’re interested in seeing more work or purchasing a piece, you may look through Bob’s catalog of work, complete with titles and pricing (on most pieces). Just send a message to Philthy Art and we’ll email you the catalog as a PDF.
So, who is Bob Jackson? To hear it from the horse’s mouth, read Bob’s self-bio below.
