Myrtle Jackson
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts preserves Jackson’s lively, detailed, monochrome brown paper ink drawing “Barn” (1973) in its permanent collection.
BiographyBorn in Gadsby, Alberta in 1927, Myrtle Jackson briefly enjoyed a Cinderella-like transformation from menial labourer to celebrity artist. In an article dated April 5, 1943, Margaret Ecker wrote, “For the past two years Myrtle Jackson’s starving in a garret for the sake of her art has been too literal to be romantic. The girl, in her early twenties, arrived in Vancouver two years ago from an Alberta farm, penniless, but determined to express herself in paint.” As Ecker explained, Jackson worked scrubbing floors and selling hamburgers at Locarno Beach while weathering her parents’ disapproval of her aesthetic vocation while living in a West End attic and studying under the tutelage of western painter A.C. Leighton. Her first exhibition vindicated her travails; staged at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1938, the event met critical acclaim for its display of Jackson’s finesse with portraits and landscapes in oils, watercolors, and ink; a 1942 show provoked even greater enthusiasm and netted several sales. Inspired by the success, she went to study at Chicago’s College Art Institute.
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts preserves Jackson’s lively, detailed, monochrome brown paper ink drawing “Barn” (1973) in its permanent collection.
