How does this poster wish to depict jackson? what would be the purpose of this?

A chat with a man who bought one of his paintings cemented Robert C. Jackson’s artistic goal.

The collector was telling the Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, contemporary realist how of all the work he owned, it was Jackson’s whimsical, colorful, subversive still life that people wanted to talk about.

That was a decade ago and at that time, Jackson hadn’t really settled on a style. He was flopping back and forth between painting traditional still lifes – usually “a bottle of wine and a pear” – and his unique brand of trompe l'oeil that features balloon animals, stacks of crayon-colored crates, towers of Oreos and hamburgers, and more fruit, the most recent an apple doing an imitation of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

The collector’s comment gave Jackson pause.

“I want to be that artist,” Jackson thought. “The one everybody talks about.”

Goodbye, wine and fruit. Hello, paintings hanging all over the country, including at the Brandywine River Museum of Art and the Delaware Art Museum.

At the Brandywine Museum, fans will see a red balloon critter taped to a shooting target in “Target the artist” (although it’s not on view now because of lighting renovations). At the Delaware museum, a self-portrait is obscured by an apple hanging in his face in “The Apple Guy.”

Jackson since has had museum showings and solo shows all over country; has been the subject of a book, “Robert C. Jackson: Paintings” by Philip Eliasoph; and wrote a book about his contemporaries, “Behind the Easel: The Unique Voices of 20 Contemporary Representational Painters,” which will be the basis, and catalog, for the Delaware Art Museum’s fall exhibition “Truth and Vision.”

Today, Jackson will unveil the poster for this year’s Wilmington Flower Market, which will feature a painting of his, at Somerville-Manning Gallery at Breck’s Mill in Greenville. A solo show of his art will hang there until April 9 and will include for the first time miniature paintings he has done on 18 postcards, nine featuring the Rockford Tower and nine of Delaware scenes. They will sell for hundreds of dollars, compared to the tens of thousands one of his canvases usually brings.

“It’s kind of scaring me how much people want them,” Jackson said last week at the gallery.

“They’re always fun,” Vicki Manning says of his work. “I love the humor. I like figuring out what the humor is. And there’s going to be more, the more you look at it.”

Jackson layers in meanings and images that keep revealing themselves with some study, taking them far beyond “cute.”

“I need people to be able to live with these,” he says.

Attended UD in engineering

Jackson, 51, grew up the oldest of five boys all born in different states, thanks to the Dupont Co. They lived in Delaware from sixth to 12th grade. He attended Brandywine High School, where he met his future wife, Suzanne Spangler. Between high school and college, his parents moved to Miami, which made him an out-of-state student at the University of Delaware.

He was a senior in electrical engineering when he decided to take an art class and loved it. His art instructor, Bob Straight, tried to get him to say on and get a master’s. But Straight also told Jackson only a few people make a living in art and most make ends meet by working at restaurants or coffee shops. Jackson, who already had a job offer, decided to stick with engineering.

He and Suzanne waited to marry until she graduated with both a business and voice degree in 1987. They moved to the D.C. area. Their daughter, Becca, who would become Miss Delaware 2013, came along in 1991.

By the time she was born, Jackson started to realize he didn’t want to turn 65 with only a career in engineering to look back on. He told Suzanne he wanted to quit and become a painter. She told him that was scary and he should talk to someone about it. He went to their pastor, Brian McLauren at Cedar Ridge Community Church, and the pastor convinced Jackson to come work for the church.

The wildly growing interdenominational congregation had been trying to find an associate pastor they kept describing as “like Bob Jackson,” who was a welcoming presence. One day, they realized they wanted THE Bob Jackson. He and the pastor cut a deal that Jackson would work one year, focusing on helping new people find their place in their church, and then either could end the arrangement.

After five years, Jackson went back to the pastor, saying he wanted to paint. The pastor said he knew he would come back, but asked him how much he made off painting in the last year. $5,000, Jackson told the pastor. Why don’t you ease out of this over the next year, the pastor suggested. So Jackson dropped one work day a week for the next few months until he was only working on Sundays.

Since then the family, which would grow to include Tessa and Luke, moved to Delaware and then to Kennett Square.

Jackson paints 30 to 35 works a year. He has favorites, but always sells them. One he loved enough to hang in the kitchen of their house didn’t stay there long. A gallery owner called him and asked where the painting was because he thought he could sell it. Bob went home and asked Suzanne if she would mind.

“How much,” she said.

“$26,000,” he said.

“Sell it,” Suzanne said.

He did.

“I can’t afford my own work,” Jackson jokes.

Jackson never attended art school, but educated himself, taking community center programs, reading books – many of which line his office walls – and attending lots of shows, especially in New York. On the wall of his studio is a News Journal photo of Jamie Wyeth, with Jackson in the background. Jackson just happened to be in the Brandywine River Museum of Art that day looking at Wyeth’s paintings. When Jackson saw the photo, he bought a copy and asked Wyeth to sign it.

What Jackson said he’s learned from his years of self-education is simple: “You want to be different. It’s important to stand out and have a unique voice.”

He loves the tradition and history of the Brandywine School of Art, started by Howard Pyle and espoused by N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth that’s so dominant in the area, but he wants his work to break through.

Jackson says he never lacks for ideas. He knows painters who sit in front of a blank canvas, sometimes for days, but believes it doesn’t help. Instead, he keeps sketchbooks with him all the time. When he finishes one painting, he’ll flip through the books, dismissing those he doesn’t like or that don’t interest him until he finds one that does.

He was surprised when the Wilmington Flower Market approached him about painting it poster, which often depicts scenes of the carnival in action.

“You do know I’m not a landscape painter, don’t you,” Jackson asked the show reps. They did.

Instead of painting a scene from the market, he took his kids to the 2015 event. They bought hamburgers and ice cream, played games and won prizes, bought a potted flower and rode rides. And all of those things appear in the photo, which includes the Five of Hearts that represents his family in an early painting, and a depiction of a postcard of Rockford Tower, which is on the market site. The posters sell for $35 each, or $65 numbered.

He’s curious to hear what people think. Jackson enjoys watching the effect the paintings have on people.

“People are always telling me the action,” he says. “I love that they come alive.”

In “Enough With the Bubbles,” a group of balloon critters sit around a table loaded with a ham, Oreos, pistachios, popcorn and fruit, and soap bubbles are blowing across the scene. Jackson says one woman told him one of the balloon animals was a man, and he was mad at the red balloon animal and went on to detail a complicated family relationship around the table.

Jackson also loves that their stories divert attention from him when he’s at an opening.

“I feel naked or exposed,” he says.

You know. Without that apple hanging in front of his face.

Contact Betsy Price at (302) 324-2884 or

If you go

WHAT: Exhibition of paintings by Robert C. Jackson, with reception at 5:30-7:30 p.m. today to unveil the 2016 Wilmington Flower Market poster, created by Jackson

WHERE: 101 Stone Block Row, Wilmington, Delaware

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays

FOR MORE INFORMATION: (302) 652-0271; somervillemanning.com

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