Malaney Jackson, now living and creating in the heart of Los Angeles, California, was born and raised amidst the rolling landscapes of North Carolina. From her early years, she was deeply immersed in the natural beauty of the East, but it was the sweeping, sun-drenched vistas and the bold, saturated colors of the West Coast that truly captivated her artistic spirit. Her work is also profoundly shaped by the innovative sculptures of Ken Price, whose exploration of form, texture, and color resonates deeply with Malaney's approach to art, blending the organic with the unexpected.
My paintings begin without rough drafts. I prefer to let an image reveal itself as I work, allowing the process to remain organic, erratic, and occasionally unpredictable. Saturated color and bold dark lines create an immediate sense of familiarity and comfort, while the scenes themselves often suggest something less certain. I'm interested in the strange isolation produced by contemporary American life: being alone in cities, canyons, bedrooms, highways, and other spaces built to contain us. Cars, buildings, clothing, furniture, and abandoned objects become traces of people who are absent from the image. Public and private spaces begin to feel interchangeable as places saturated with exposure, work,
consumption, and apathy, yet strangely empty.
I think of apricity, an old English word meaning the warmth of the sun in winter, as a guiding idea in my work. I want the paintings to be pleasurable before they
become unsettling: comforting colors surrounding uncomfortable
circumstances, humor beside loneliness, and beauty persisting
somewhere inside the absurdity of it all.
