By: Sonora Slater for The Dirt
Pauline Jackson truly believes, “a problem is an opportunity.” Jackson, a retired school psychologist and burgeoning artist, says that she first learned this lesson from her father, who was deaf — but she’s also learned it through her own life and work. “It’s a time when you can let go of your left brain, and just see what cooks up in your head.”
She put this into practice when creating the 20 one-of-a-kind quilts that make up her first-ever art show, opening in Davis on April 26 at the Davis Arts Center. The quilts recreate classic Davis landmarks from the Farmers Market, to the Arboretum, to the Compassion Bench on the corner of 3rd and C.
Jackson lives in Florida, but her son Tony and his wife are raising their kids in Davis. He encouraged his mom to create a series of pieces capturing his town to showcase the quilting skills she’s spent nearly 30 years developing.
“I’ve always liked the idea of creating a whole collection to represent something, but I think it’s only particular artsy communities that would respond well to what I did,” Jackson told The Dirt. “Tony told me how much people love Davis, and whenever I’m there, I can feel it. So I thought, well, this might be worth my efforts.”
Deciding which scenes to include was quite the endeavor, with Tony first scouting out the town and then sending Jackson dozens of photos to choose from — but that’s just the first step in the lengthy quilt-making process. After selecting a photo to recreate, she has it enlarged by her local print shop on a piece of paper to the size the quilt is going to be (usually two feet by three feet), selects fabrics from the fabric store (and then goes back again for the colors she missed), draws out a simplified version of the design on heat-bonded paper, and gets to work laying out the design.
After that, she pieces it together with color-matched zigzag stitches, and sends it off to a group with computerized long-arm sewing machines that then quilt the fabric with criss cross lines, swirls, or any number of other pre-programmed shapes. The pattern Jackson chose for her quilt of the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame? Rows and rows of bikes.
“I never thought I’d make 20 quilts,” Jackson said. “I thought that it would stop at maybe 12. But I just kept going and going and going.”
One of the first times Jackson publicly shared her art was when she exhibited three of the first quilts she ever made at a show in Jacksonville. Although she is proud of the work she did, she acknowledged that her process “doesn’t follow any rules” of traditional quilting, which led to her being marked down by the show’s judges for technique.
“That discouraged me so much, and it just made me feel so stupid,” Jackson said. “Slowly I’ve come to accept myself, but it’s ridiculous. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, but it’s still hard for me to say I’m an artist. I never went to art school. I’ve never been trained. But my sister tells me, ‘You are an artist. You make things. That’s what an artist is.’”
At her local fabric shop, technically proficient, beautiful geometric quilts hang from the walls. Jackson said that for a long time, looking at these made her feel inadequate — but then she spoke to the people who made them.
“I don’t know how to make those kinds of quilts,” Jackson said. “But they’ve seen my work, and they keep telling me, ‘Look at what you do. We don’t know how to do what you do.’”
Jackson’s word of advice to aspiring artists
Another thing that both working with kids and working with fabric has taught Jackson is that creativity is a virtue — and one that the 18+ crowd all-too-often pushes to the wayside. “We don’t trust our creativity,” she admitted of adults.
Her advice for the antidote to this phenomenon?
“You should jump in,” Jackson said. “Let all the oughts and shoulds out of your brain, and get some needle and thread, paints, clay, whatever it is. It doesn’t have to lead to anything — maybe just giving you some pleasure. Giving you an escape from the anxieties of life. It’s certainly never too late.”
For Jackson, that happy medium, quite literally, is fabric. Despite the challenges of depicting reality with small, patterned shapes (and she admits that as much as she loves quilting, the challenges and frustrations throughout the process are many), there’s something about capturing these scenes for people, in the same way women of so many generations have done before her, that gives her great joy.
“When I’m involved in the quilt project, it’s like there’s no such thing as time — it just passes me by,” Jackson said. “Honestly, I’m 78, but I feel like I have such a future in doing this.”
