Kay Jackson at Addison/Ripley Fine Art

When we walk through a crowd of people, we don’t see everything. We see little glimpses or slices of movement. We see light, shapes, shifting expressions in a sea of faces. And those little fractured pieces—a gesture, a movement, a reflection—create a reality.

The steady density of urban living surrounds us all with these moments, these fleeting torrents of life that wash endlessly by. “And that’s what I am aiming at,” says painter Kay Jackson, discussing the paintings in her new exhibit at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, on view through May 2. “There is no whole picture, just little bits and fragments of an endlessly renewable composition that create and reflect today’s world.”

Kay Jackson is a painter’s painter. Perhaps this is pulling a tired phrase, but in Jackson’s case there is simply no other way I can say it. The first time I saw her work in 2012, I was struck hard by her remarkable draftsmanship and singular style. She applies Old Master techniques to contemporary settings, using oil glazing, gold leaf and virtuosic tonal control to create works that feel unquestionably of our era. While some painters today capitalize on these techniques as an erudite gimmick, Jackson employs them in service to the larger work with elegant subtlety and naturalness.

When asked about this, her response is unassuming. “That’s just the artwork that I admire the most,” she says. “It’s hard to improve on traditional oil painting techniques.”

Exhibiting since the 1980s, Jackson’s work frequently focuses on environmental concerns, such as pollution and the loss of animal habitats. Her last exhibition at Addison/Ripley featured immaculate gilded icons of endangered species (which you must see up close to properly appreciate their beauty). The subjects that drive her work have striking correlations to the endangered old world techniques—largely forgotten by artists today—which she uses to create them. It is also hard to ignore the preservationist aspect of these practices in parallel to issues like wildlife conservation.

Her current exhibit focuses on a different environmental risk, and one that has engrossed her for over a quarter century. The exhibition title, ‘Malthusian Paintings,’ refers to the theory of overpopulation developed throughout the early 1800s by English scholar Thomas Malthus.

It began for Jackson in 1988, with a series of vivid dreams: throngs of people replaced cars on the streets and moved in an endless herd through the city. To deal with the anxiety the dreams caused her, she began taking her camera out during rush hour traffic and snapping photographs of the crowds. She then used these photos as references for her first Malthusian paintings.

The canvases are crowded with moving figures, often faceless or submerged by darkness, connected in kaleidoscopic patterns of light and shadow. The allusions of movement border on abstraction, as suggestions of human figures collide with architectural gestures and patches of gold and copper leaf, layered between veils of paint to create a luminescent surface.

And yet the anonymous human figures throughout these paintings, even in the hint of but a few simple brushstrokes, are fully realized, taking on the air of apparitions.

Jackson is such a good painter that it is dangerously easy to overlook how expertly these works are conceived and rendered. They seem to have no composition at all, as natural to look at as a crowded city street. Reminiscent of James McNeill Whistler’s atmospheric naturalism, these “all-over” compositions are like movie stills plucked from the ether. They are immediately accepted by our eyes as simply right, meshing seamlessly with our living memories of the surrounding world.

And what is perhaps most astonishing is the whisper-like nuance with which she pulls this off. There is plenty to admire at a glance, but in a way these works beg patience and attention. These are paintings that will slowly unfold and evolve over many years, paintings to which you will keep returning. These are paintings that carry secrets. Their inner-life seems in many ways equal to their time spent resonating in the artist’s mind. Such is the rich beauty with works like this, which an artist works on for as many years.

“A lot of these canvases are multilayered,” Jackson says, “in the sense that if I did not like what I saw, I just kept painting over it. And that’s when the really magical stuff happens—you get the echo of other images coming through the painting.”

Addison/Ripley is a gallery that makes great use of its relatively modest space, and the 27 pieces of varying sizes lend a sort of retrospective quality to the exhibit. And as a body of work spanning 27 years, it is hard to think of it any other way.

“I’ve always made these paintings because I just love them,” she says, simply. “I can try to talk about them, but it is hard to find words that explain the non-verbal world of painting.”

To experience the steady, mesmerizing rhythms of Jackson’s paintings is to give into that world. It is a beautiful encounter.

Kay Jackson’s ‘Malthusian Paintings: 25 Years and Counting,’ is on view through May 2 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art: 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. For more information visit www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com