Sandy Jackoboice:
modern art in a traditional context

No matter how diverse an artist's work may be, it is inevitable that he or she be connected in the minds of viewers and buyers with one favorite piece or, in the case of Sandy Jackoboice, with a genre in which she has particular facility. For Sandy, that is florals. While accomplished in landscape and portraiture, Sandy is best known for her floral work.

Floral art has gotten short shrift in recent decades, particularly after the brutality of non-objective Expressionism and the coolness of Modernism. However, the ironic twist that turned the work of one of the greatest floral artists, Georgia O'Keefe, into a caricature of the genre is lost of those who still paint floral work and, more importantly, to those who love flowers in art.Sandy Jackoboice's work can stand on its own two artistic feet. Yet it is also undeniably a branch of an artistic family tree whose roots extend back centuries. The first two pieces on this page owe much visually to two great traditions of floral work.

Full Bloom is reminiscent of classic botanical renderings of the late 1700s and early 1800s, where voyages of discovery mapped not only islands and coastlines but also plants and flowers.

Spring Bouquet, whose tight, asymmetrical composition and subject matter that crowds the horizon of the painting to nearly the upper border remind one of French and Belgian works from roughly a century earlier, when painters were specialists in a given genre. The colors and light are fanciful, almost playful, and the depiction of the flowers is more symbolic than literal.

Children are a a favorite of portraitists rather than floralists. But genres often spill over from one to the next. God's Gifts, in which a girl stands in a garden in front of a wall of flowers, joins John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose in the tradition of children-in-garden paintings popular in 19th Century portraiture of the offspring of landed gentry in both England and America.

Watercolor, like pastel, occupies a sort of tidal pool in the ocean of art history. While sculpture, oils and frescos get the main bulk of the artistic press, there are strong traditions in both of these media that extend to early artistic periods. Both media have die-hard enthusiasts and adherents despite being called "dead" forms every decade or so. Just Hanging Around is a pastel but it's smooth rendering, composition and finely detailed rendering of a complex yet familiar object is reminiscent of watercolor work. It is an interest mix of expectations for both media and subject matter that is appealing and inviting.

In a nod to the tight composition and severely cropped picture plane of Georgia O'Keefe, Sandy's White Lily is a bold statement of the beauty of form found in flowers. But it is rendered with a wholly un-O'Keefe-like love of detail that makes the piece even more powerful than some of the earlier artist's abstractions.

Despite references to visual traditions of the past, Sandy Jackoboice's artwork is a statement of her modern view of flowers in art. Close cropping and macrolens detail unite in an artistic depiction of the sensuous, bold and often explosive nature of the flower in modern painting.

Reviewed Richard Williamson
for The Copywriters News ©2004 .

Richard Williamson is a freelance writer who holds a BFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is an alumnus of the History of Art Program at England's prestigious University of Bristol. Email him here.