My Double Life

My life has been spent working with images and, more recently, with words—a creative life lived in two worlds. I’ll be posting observations and comments on those efforts on this website, and I’ll also present some of my art and writing. I hope you enjoy this exploration of the creative life.

So how did this ‘double life’ come about?

I’ve been drawing all my life and painting since middle school, so it should come as no surprise that my goal in life was to become an artist. Yet at the University of Georgia, where I studiedart, I took all the history courses I could and came to enjoy writing term papers. Yes, you read that correctly. Though over the years my creative focus remained on art, specifically painting and selling through galleries, I found myself spending time writing about gallery and museum shows. Then came interviews with artists in which we discussed and tried to explicate their artwork. (Some of these older pieces can still be found at: www.jacksonpointart.com.)

Nevertheless, writing about the arts and other artists remained a sideline to my work as an artist. Then I found fiction. Oh, along the way, I’d flirted with it. I’d attempted a couple of novels in my salad days, but they remained suitably unfinished and forgotten. However, sitting in a coffee shop in Mobile, Alabama, my wife and I sketched out ideas for a novel set in Atlanta in 1866. After years of work and many drafts, An Uncertain Peace was published this fall by Jennifer Chesak at Wandering in the Words Press.

Once you’ve managed a novel, not much else is out of bounds. I’m currently working on a book of short fiction. There is a novel set in 1950s Italy and France that is partially finished. A follow-up to An Uncertain Peace is banging around in my brain.

Still, having said all that, I remain at heart an artist. The ink wash drawing above is from my recent show at In-Town Gallery in Chattanooga, TN. Both writing and painting mean a great deal to me, and I suppose I’ll spend the rest of my life running between them.